readers
What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in Passage de l’Odéon (2003). Ernest Hemingway mythologized the bookshop and lending library in A Moveable Feast (1964), and Woody Allen satirized that mythology in Midnight in Paris (2011). Countless writers have described Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): Richard Ellmann in James Joyce (1959), Kevin Birmingham in The Most Dangerous Book (2014), Keri Maher in The Paris Bookseller (2022)—to name just three. In the aftermath of the Ulysses centennial, we might assume we know all there is to know about Beach’s “famous bookshop and lending library on the Le
Gertrude Stein “was disappointed in me when I published Ulysses,” wrote Sylvia Beach in her 1959 memoir; “she even came with Alice to my bookshop to announce that they had transferred their membership to the American Library on the Right Bank.”[1] Stein’s move—from Shakespeare and Company to the American Library in Paris—has sustained the ongoing scholarly and popular representation of the two libraries as rivals, framing membership as an act of allegiance.
The growth of social reading platforms such as Goodreads and LibraryThing enables us to analyze reading activity at very large scale and in remarkable detail. But twenty-first century systems give us a perspective only on contemporary readers. Meanwhile, the digitization of the lending library records of Shakespeare and Company (SC) provides a window into the reading activity of an earlier, smaller community in interwar Paris. In this article, we explore the extent to which we can make comparisons between the SC and Goodreads communities. By quantifying similarities and differences, we are able to identify patterns in how works have risen or fallen in popularity across these datasets. We can also measure differences in how works are received by measuring similarities and differences in co-reading patterns. Finally, by examining the complete networks of co-readership, we can observe changes in the overall structures of literary reception.