What did Ernest Hemingway read when he lived in Paris? What about Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Simone de Beauvoir, Aimé Césaire, Katherine Mansfield, and Ezra Pound?
Using the archives of Sylvia Beach’s famous bookshop and lending library, the Shakespeare and Company Project reveals the reading habits of the century’s most influential writers, along with thousands of other artists and intellectuals who lived in Paris between the two world wars.
Learn about the members of the Shakespeare and Company lending library. Browse and read the books they borrowed.
In 1919, an American named Sylvia Beach (1887 – 1962) opened an English-language bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank in Paris. She called it Shakespeare and Company, and it quickly became the center of expatriate life in the city. In 1922, she published James Joyce’s Ulysses under the Shakespeare and Company imprint, making the bookshop and lending library famous around the world. Over the next two decades, she sold and loaned books—everything from avant-garde poetry to birth control manuals. In 1941, she closed the bookshop and lending library during the German occupation of France. She would never reopen Shakespeare and Company, but she continued to loan books from her apartment until her death.
The Shakespeare and Company Project features articles about how the lending library worked, its most popular authors, the geography of Paris, and much more. To read the latest research based on the Project, explore The World of Shakespeare and Company, co-published by the Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity.
The Shakespeare and Company Project relies on three sources from Sylvia Beach's archives at Princeton University: lending library cards, logbooks, and address books. Researchers can download the Project’s datasets, which provide a unique portrait of the development of modernism. An introduction to the datasets is available in the Journal of Cultural Analytics.
The Shakespeare and Company Project is a work-in-progress. For updates, follow us on Instagram.
Questions? Contact us.