Abstract
This article describes three data sets from the Shakespeare and Company Project. The data sets provide information about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris. The first data set focuses on the members of the lending library. The second, on the books that circulated in the lending library. The third, on the events—borrows, purchases, subscriptions, renewals, deposits, reimbursements—that connected members and books. Together, the three data sets promise to address and bridge concerns in modernist studies, the digital humanities, and the public humanities. Work on the data sets began in 2014. The first two versions of the data sets were released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The current version, 1.2, was released in 2022. Over forty people have contributed to the data sets.
Highlights
What if Sylvia Beach had had access to a computer at Shakespeare and Company, her bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? What if she had used the computer to record the names and addresses of lending library members, along with the books they bought and borrowed? Gertrude Stein paying fifty francs for her first lending library membership on March 16, 1920
What if scholars and the general public had access to that computer today? What would we learn about Paris in the 1920s and 1930s; about the Lost Generation; about Stein, Joyce, and Hemingway? What books would we re-discover? Whose lives would we be able to explore? How would the computer change our understanding of modernism, and cultural and intellectual history more generally?
The Project makes its data available in three data sets, which may be downloaded in CSV and JSON formats
Summary
What if Sylvia Beach had had access to a computer at Shakespeare and Company, her bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? What if she had used the computer to record the names and addresses of lending library members, along with the books they bought and borrowed? Gertrude Stein paying fifty francs for her first lending library membership on March 16, 1920. The Project uses documents from the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University Library and other libraries to give researchers and the general public access to the world of Shakespeare and Company. (Beach published three books under the Shakespeare and Company imprint—all related to Joyce Most significantly, she published Ulysses, which she tenaciously kept in print through eleven printings between 1922 and 1930.)[2] Visitors to the Project website can browse and search the lending library’s membership and holdings, explore maps of Paris, and track the borrowing histories of specific writers and the circulation of specific books. The first data set focuses on lending library members or “subscribers,” and includes addresses, membership years, and demographic information. The third data set focuses on lending library events, and includes information about borrows, purchases, subscriptions, renewals, and other transactions.
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