The World of Shakespeare and Company: An Introduction

Written by
Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Modernism/modernity
May 30, 2024

What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris?

On May 28, 2024, the journals Journal of Cultural Analytics and Modernism/modernity co-published a cluster of eight articles using data from the Shakespeare and Company Project, a digital humanities initiative and web application directed by Associate Professor of English Joshua Kotin and sponsored by the Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). Kotin and CDH lead research software engineer Rebecca Sutton Koeser co-wrote an introduction to the cluster, excerpted below.

Among the articles in the cluster is "A Counterfactual Canon" by English doctoral candidate Fedor Karmanov and Kotin. Karmanov recently defended his dissertation and moves to the role of postgraduate research associate with the department on June 1, 2024.

English doctoral candidate Emily Lobb acted as a managing editor to see the special issue into print.

 — Sarah Malone, Department of English

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 Left Bank.”[1]

This cluster of articles, co-published by Modernism/modernity and the Journal of Cultural Analytics, challenges that assumption. The cluster focuses on Beach’s archives at Princeton University through the lens of the Shakespeare and Company Project, a digital humanities initiative that details the lending library’s operations, including what its members read and where they lived.[2] By analyzing documents and data provided by the Project, the cluster does not simply deepen standard accounts of Shakespeare and Company and its world; it presents new stories and asks new questions that alter our understanding of the institution and its impact, and establish its relevance to present-day debates in literary history and theory.

Reading the cluster, we gain new insights into canonical authors and the modernist canon. (One article, for instance, compares Virginia Woolf’s theory of the “common reader” to her actual readers in Paris.) We discover how members of the lending library influenced the reception of modernist literature, and how reading can influence personal identity. (An article examines the reading practices of Reed Peggram, a queer African American scholar studying in Paris.) We also learn about Shakespeare and Company’s influence on various communities and movements, including a transnational Black avant-garde. Finally, we discover how Beach’s obsessive yet incomplete record keeping can help us develop tools to compensate for and interpret the gaps that perforate almost all historical archives and cultural datasets.

The cluster also contributes to debates about methodology. Articles embrace a range of methods, illuminating ways to attend individual and often ephemeral documents—a borrowing record, a letter—as well as large collections of documents organized and curated into datasets. These qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods are not in competition. The cluster demonstrates how a commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative research, whether jointly authored articles or coordinated responses to a common object, can move literary studies in new directions. The joint publication of this cluster by the leading journals in modernist studies and cultural analytics further demonstrates this commitment.

The cluster, in this way, shows how digital humanities projects can ground and motivate an astonishing range of research. The Shakespeare and Company Project is a work of scholarship and an instrument of scholarship. By interpreting, structuring, and supplementing an extensive and at times chaotic collection of documents, the Project transforms archival sources into data. The Project makes this data available for analysis through a user-friendly web interface and published, carefully documented datasets. Researchers can work at different scales, embracing both close and distant reading—as well as what has been variously called “scalable,” “zoomable,” and even “macroscopic” reading.[3] The article on Woolf begins by close reading a series of lending library records and then shifts to a medium-scale analysis of the members who borrowed Woolf’s books. An article comparing readers at Shakespeare and Company to reading communities today moves in the opposite direction: a large-scale analysis of borrowing networks reveals a friendship between two lending library members based on similar reading practices. Even the articles that do not employ quantitative and computational methods take advantage of the Project’s data, whether to develop an argument based on the circulation of a particular book or a single data point such as Beach’s gift of Bryher’s The Heart to Artemis (1962) to a young literary critic months before Beach’s death. This is what the best digital humanities projects can do: harness intellectual and methodological differences to address a common set of concerns.

[1] “The New Books at Sylvia Beach’s Famous Bookshop and Lending Library,” New York Herald Tribune, May 18, 1936, 2.

[2] For a history of the Shakespeare and Company Project and an account of its datasets, see Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser, “Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets,” Journal of Cultural Analytics 7, no. 1 (2022): 1–35.

[3] Ryan Cordell, “What Makes Computational Evidence Significant for Literary-Historical Argument?Ryan C. Cordell, July 27, 2017, referencing Martin Mueller, “Shakespeare His Contemporaries: Collaborative Curation and Exploration of Early Modern Drama in a Digital Environment,” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 008, no. 3, Oct. 2014; Shawn Graham, et al., Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope, 2nd ed. (Singapore: World Scientific, 2022).

Co-published in The Journal of Cultural Analytics.