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Newly digitised lending cards from Shakespeare and Company uncover the choices of luminaries including Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein
A project to digitise records from the bookshop and lending library Shakespeare and Company offers a window into Paris during the jazz age, revealing the reading habits of literary titans including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.
The handwritten cards show that in 1925, decades before he wrote his novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was borrowing Joshua Slocum’s memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World. And the records, scrawled by the shop’s clerks, chart how Stein matched intellectual pursuits with lighter reading including TH Crosfield’s historical romance A Love in Ancient Days, and Andrew Soutar’s fantasy Equality Island. Continue reading...