Libraries in lockdown

Lara Haggerty is Keeper of Books at Scotland’s first free public lending library, the Library of Innerpeffray. A library of national significance, in a very rural location, Innerpeffray is now a museum that relies on volunteers for its day-to-day operation and visitors for income. Lara describes a library in lockdown from a different perspective.

Beach, Sylvia (1887–1962)

Sylvia Beach was an American expatriate best known as the owner of the iconic Parisian Shakespeare and Company bookstore, located at 8 rue Dupuytren until 1921, and then at 12 rue de l’Odéon the Left Bank area of the city. The popular bookstore and lending library was a point of convergence for many modernist writers and artists in Paris’ thriving arts community, including Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, André Maurois, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce. A supporter of James Joyce, Beach was the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. Born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, Sylvia Beach spent much of her youth distancing herself from a household made uneasy by the tense marriage of her mother, Eleanor Thomazine Orbison, and father, Sylvester Beach, a Presbyterian minister who served several parishes in New England, including the prominent Princeton, New Jersey community. Beach’s early refusal of material wealth was often at odds with her father’s attempts to gain social status among affluent Princeton parishioners. However, Beach found some hope for her ambition of becoming an independent woman during a year spent in Paris in 1902, during which her father served as Associate Pastor of the American Church of Paris. This period helped develop Beach’s love for Paris, its artists, and its liberal atmosphere.

Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare and Company is the legendary English-language lending library and bookstore in Paris, which was founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach (1887–1962). The shop opened at 8 rue Dupuytren but later relocated to 12 rue de l’Odéon in 1921 opposite the shop of Beach’s long-time business and personal partner, Adrienne Monnier (1892–1955). Shakespeare and Company operated until Beach was taken prisoner in 1941 during the German occupation of France; in 1944, Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) participated in liberating the store.

Monnier, Adrienne (1892–1955)

Adrienne Monnier was a gifted writer, editor, bookseller, publisher, patron, and salon keeper based in Paris. For the first half of the twentieth century, Monnier was at the centre of an international intellectual network, a sought-after hostess who welcomed to her home and table many American friends of her companion, Sylvia Beach. Her bookstore, La Maison des Amis de Livres, was located at 7 rue de l’Odeon. It was made possible by the indemnity money that Monnier’s father got from a train accident. Initially, it served as a lending library and specialized in modern authors, with a section on the ‘entire world’ and another on Tibet and Tibetan yoga. Her love of books turned the place from an anonymous bookstore to, as France Soir put it in 1953, ‘un espáce de célebrité’. Monnier organized readings called ‘Les Séance des Amis des Livre’ and held Wednesday gatherings devoted to lectures and presentations. In her bookstore Valery Larbaud lectured on James Joyce for the first time on December 7, 1921. An untiring cultural entrepreneur, she also edited and published her own review, Le Navire d’Argent.

Buying and Borrowing Books: Book Consumption In Late Nineteenth-Century Sweden (pp 121-154)

How did Swedish readers in the late nineteenth century acquire reading materials, and what books were the most popular? And how did their reading preferences change over time?A few unique, recently discovered sources, consisting of sales’ and borrowers’ ledgers from three different institutions – a parish library, a commercial lending library and a bookshop – can help to answer these questions. These three institutions represented key elements of the Swedish book trade, and together they served customers from the entire social spectrum, from farmhands, blacksmiths and labourers to bishops, noblemen and literary critics. Generally speaking, the Swedish reading public of the late nineteenth century was divided into two groups: those who bought books, and those who borrowed them. The bookshop was where all the latest books could be found, and Strindberg, Ibsen and Daudet were among the best-selling authors. The parish library, by contrast, had only a limited range of fiction – mainly written by an earlier generation of authors – and primarily acquired books that would enlighten and educate, rather than entertain. However, the members of the parish library preferred fiction above all, and over the years they transformed from omnivorous to discerning readers. The commercial lending library, which specialised in novels, attracted many bookworms, with some people borrowing from fifty to one hundred books a year, very often historical novels.Different customer groups seem to have had different literary preferences. The study shows for example that female customers of the bookshop tended to buy books on women’s emancipation, and preferred Tolstoy to Strindberg – who was the male customers’ favourite. And while romantic and gothic stories, and the so-called “city mysteries” by Eugène Sue were hugely popular among the students and the artisans of the commercial lending library, they aroused little interest among the bookshop’s customers.