La Maison des Amis des Livres

The place, briefly

Adrienne Monnier opened her shop on 15 November 1915, in the middle of the war, at twenty-three — one of the first women in France to found a bookshop of her own. The name she chose, La Maison des Amis des Livres, said exactly what she meant: not a store but a house of friends, run on a subscription lending library so that readers who could not buy books could still read them. She sold and lent the moderns — and she made the two rooms a salon, with readings and conversation that pulled in the whole of French letters, Gide and Valéry and Larbaud among the faithful.

In 1917 an American in Paris named Sylvia Beach walked in, and the shop acquired its transatlantic half. When Beach opened Shakespeare and Company — and in 1921 moved it to No. 12, directly across the street — the rue de l'Odéon became a single institution with two doors, French literature on one side and English on the other, run by two women who were partners in work and in life. Larbaud, who lived around the corner, named the country 'Odéonia.'

The shop's great night came on 7 December 1921. Some two hundred and fifty people packed the two rooms — twice what the program allowed — to hear Valery Larbaud lecture on an unpublished Irish novel called Ulysses and read translated passages aloud, to loud applause, with Joyce himself in the room. The book itself appeared eight weeks later from Beach's shop across the street. Monnier kept going where the séance pointed: her review Le Navire d'Argent (1925–26) printed Prufrock in French — translated by Monnier and Beach themselves — and gave Hemingway his first appearance in the language; in 1929 she published the French Ulysse from the shop. She closed the house in 1951, after thirty-six years on the street she and Beach had made the address of two literatures.