The difference in address distribution might also result from the libraries’ modes of operation and outreach. Shakespeare & Co. is built on interpersonal relationships, epitomized by its owner Sylvia Beach’s relationship with Adrienne Monnier: in 1921, the bookshop and lending library moved to 12 rue de l’Odéon, across the street from Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, a French bookshop and lending library. By that time, Beach and Monnier were living together as lovers. Interpersonal intimacy translates into physical proximity, as well as into institutional partnership: members of Monnier’s library were exempted from deposit at Shakespeare & Co. and given a twenty percent discount. Readers who joined one library would therefore be prompted to join the other right next door as well. Thus membership was no longer a neutral object exchanged and transacted, but rather geographically and interpersonally contingent. Being a member of Shakespeare & Co. could mean to be part of a community that live together (within a certain part of the city), works together, and socialize together.
Sylvia Beach is the symbolic and physical center of this community - her name is featured on the front page of flyers, right below “SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY” as part of the title. Above is a cartoonish figure of Shakespeare, contemplating under an arch with a pen and paper in hand. When readers fail to return their books on time, Sylvia Beach sent them a notice featuring an exasperated Shakespeare pulling his hairs out. The actual person pulling hairs out would be herself - the owner and the librarian. Consequently, there formed a triangle of cross-representational relationships: the cartoon figure of Shakespeare served as a visual stand-in for Sylvia Beach, while the historical figure of Shakespeare acted as the titular cultural backbone of the Library. Sylvia Beach, on the other hand, was the social backbone of the Library. Her library was thus personified, by both the cartoonish Shakespeare and herself; from this center, flyers and notices went out, carrying the imprints of both of these figures, exercising a double pull on those at the physical and symbolic peripheries (e.g. unrepresented neighborhoods, prospective members, inactive members with overdue books, etc.).
While the Turgenev Library is also named after a canonical literary figure, it did not leverage this potential cultural capital and turn Ivan Turgenev into a mascot. Its overdue notices were drafted in a formal, respectful and dry manner. Nor did it have a contemporary figure that emanated influence as a metonymy for the library itself. Without revealing any names of representatives or librarians in the published catalogues, the Turgenev Library presents itself as an anonymous entity, relying less on an interpersonal model than an institutional model. The catalogues featured ads for other organizations whose services facilitated the lives of Russian émigrés, not organizations owned by the librarian’s girlfriend, for example (though we never know for sure). Featured at the back of the 1929 belletristic catalogue include a restaurant in the 5th arrondissement, two bookshops in the 6th, a pharmacy and a jewelry shop in the 8th, a beauty salon, a wine-grocery shop and an funeral service provider in the 9th, a bank in the 10th, a medical-surgical cabinet in the 15th, another bookshop in the 16th, and a men’s suit shop in the 17th. These locations are dispersed on the Left and Right Banks, gravitating towards the west half of the city, and roughly correspond to where the members lived.
In contrast to Shakespeare & Co’s center-periphery model, the distribution of these locations across various arrondissements suggests an effort to build a city-wide rhizomatic network for the émigrés, in which the Turgenev Library is only a node rather than a center. This model does not suggest that the members did not socialize with each other, but that their interactions were more dispersed. The priority is not to attract everyone to the Turgenev or to the 5th arrondissement where it is the located, but rather to make sure that émigrés who lived in the 16th arrondissement can also find Russian-language books in their own district.
Works Cited:
Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Norton, 1983), 73-74.
Joshua Kotin, “Becoming a Member of the Shakespeare and Company Lending Library.”