Lending Books on the Left and Right Banks: Borrowing Practices at the American Library in Paris and Shakespeare and Company

Abstract

Shakespeare and Company and the American Library in Paris (ALP) have long been represented as rivals. Yet the relationship between the two preeminent American lending libraries in Paris—both of which opened their doors after World War I as the city was becoming the heart of Anglophone modernist literature—is more complicated. This article uses records from the Shakespeare and Company lending library, historical newspapers, and the ALP’s annual Year Book to reveal connections between the two institutions. The article asks us to stop treating the libraries as rivals and understand them as complementary nodes in the network of Paris’s interwar Anglophone community.