Palattella features Sylvia Beach, founder of the legendary English-language Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Beach told a version a half-century ago in her memoir Shakespeare and Company; Shari Benstock offered another thirty years later in Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. She published Ulysses, arranged for the first French translation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," translated Henri Michaux and advocated for a French edition of Yeats's poems. But there's no use denying it: her letters are generally tedious. Literary gossip, personal confessions, rants, raves and judgments about the work of the authors Beach championed are mostly absent. Her letters, dutiful exercises in the tallying of personal and business obligations renewed, satisfied and overdue, often feel like they were torn from a ledger. Yet in the tedium of the letters lies a valuable lesson: literary institutions are hard-won achievements.