Press and Media

For discussions of the Shakespeare and Company Project in scholarship, visit our citations page.

"There's something illicit about learning about what and how people read—we're learning about a very private, solitary activity."

—The Guardian (2020)

"The archives of Shakespeare and Company, the Left Bank bookstore and lending library founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, shed colourful light on the reading habits of the writers and thinkers of the 'Lost Generation' and their circle."

—The Times (London, 2020)

"On the membership list you'll find big names, sure. You’ll also come across less famous but no less interesting figures, too, from a respected French physicist to the woman who started the musicology program at the University of Southern California."

—Literary Hub (2020)

"Great writers don't come out of nowhere, even if some of them might end up there. They grow in gardens tended by other writers, readers, editors, and pioneering booksellers."

—Open Culture (2020)

"Qu'y avait-il sur la table de chevet d'Hemingway? Quelles lectures ont bien pu passionner James Joyce, inspirer les poètes Ezra Pound ou Gertrude Stein?"

—Le Temps (2020)

"An absolutely invaluable addition to digital scholarship on the writing of the interwar years and a veritable treasure trove for researchers who want to find out more about one of the perennial black holes in book history: who read what and when? [...] The Shakespeare and Company Project will undoubtedly become a key digital resource for many researchers on modernism and print culture in the future."

— Reviews in Digital Humanities (2021)

"Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Shakespeare and Company Project, and one that highlights its digital humanities-based approach, is its intention of engaging with users and scholars."

—Art Libraries Society of Society of North America (2021)

"The Shakespeare and Company Project presents a new portrait of the Lost Generation and life in interwar Paris by illuminating the daily operations of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and lending library."

—Modernist Studies Association (2020)

"We hope to see more projects that link the aims of libraries with the aims of social scientists and humanists developing quantitative approaches to literary criticism and literary history."

—James Joyce Quarterly (2017)

"The shop closed in 1941, but now a project run out of Princeton University has published the lending lists of borrowers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein."

—Radio New Zealand (2020)

Finalist: Innovation by Design Awards in the learning category.

— Fast Company (2021)

"She wanted to live a life in literature and invented a new way of doing it."

—Princeton Magazine (2021)

"The project's various components invite visitors to explore more than 6,000 books, read research (e.g., essays exploring gender and sexual expression and analyzing lending records), and browse membership logs."

—Internet Scout Research Group (2021)

"Si tardaban en la devolución, la política era siempre la misma: se le entregaba un dibujo que retrataba a Shakespeare arrancándose el pelo."

—El País (2020)

"It's rare to have access to a library's borrowing records because the American Library Association requires such records be destroyed for privacy reasons, points out Kotin. 'As a scholar, I'm happy Sylvia Beach didn't follow those guidelines.'"

—Princeton Alumni Weekly (2020)

"In fact, just in 2020, as I was finishing my manuscript, Princeton launched a fantastic website called the Shakespeare and Company Project, for which all of Sylvia's receipts and library cards have been scanned and catalogued and put into a searchable database so you can look up, say, what James Joyce checked out in 1926. The project has a variety of other marvelous twenty-first century learning tools that I think Sylvia herself would have embraced, and of you're loath to leave this world as you read these final words, I encourage you to go there and explore."

—Kerri Maher, The Paris Bookseller (2022)

"Like the members of Shakespeare and Company, the student interns have greatly benefited from a sense of community as they worked on their internships this summer—community amongst themselves, with Kotin, and with other faculty members and graduate students associated with the Shakespeare and Company Project."

—The Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton (2021)

"To extend our community outreach, the library partners with the many municipal, non-profit, and business organizations that make Princeton such an extraordinary town. This month, the “Shakespeare and Company Project,” a digital humanities initiative at Princeton University, is in the spotlight."

—Princeton Public Library (2020)

"The great 20th century authors: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Aimé Césaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Ezra Pound, Walter Benjamin, and many more. We all know and read them. But what did they read? What authors influenced their work, and which literary works in turn inspired their literature?"

—Princeton University Library News (2020)

"Princeton University's Shakespeare and Company Project has digitized hundreds of the library's lending cards and logbooks, and has made the data available to explore and download."

—Data Is Plural (2020)

"Hemingway's reading list from these earliest days is presumably lost, though researchers at the Shakespeare and Company Project are piecing together the records of Hemingway's and others' reading habits."

— The Hemingway Society (2022)

"With Shakespeare and Company proprietor, Sylvia Beach's archives as the source, Princeton University librarians, digital humanists, and students are mapping an ever-evolving, complex digital portrait of literary life in early 20th-century Paris."

— Poetry Foundation (2020)

"Examination of the newly digitised reading-cards, records of membership and renewals, has highlighted the reading preferences of some of the twentieth century’s most famous authors."

— James Joyce Broadsheet (2020)