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Using the lens of gender, this essay examines the lives and collective contributions of American women who participated in the book world of Paris during the 1920s. The focus is on the American Library in Paris, which inherited the American Library Association (ALA) Library War Service reference collection and the Paris Library School operated by ALA from 1923 to 1929. Working in each of these settings, women found innovative ways to make American books and print culture more widely known in France.
"Not bad at all, the life of a librarian in Paris!"1 This blithe assessment was offered by the authors of a 1929 guidebook entitled Paris Is a Woman's Town. Librarians and booksellers were part of a small but enthusiastic group of expatriates who promoted the dissemination of American books and print culture in Paris during the twenties. Most studies of this fascinating decade focus on writers and small presses that were able to enjoy greater freedom of expression in France at a time when works with overtly sexual content were banned in the United States and Britain.
However, Americans who participated in the book world of Paris were much more diverse than the bohemian circle of writers who lived on the Left Bank and frequented Sylvia Beach's English-language bookshop, Shakespeare & Company. In fact, the book world in Paris can be thought of as a number of overlapping circles whose members included philanthropists and librarians as well as readers, writers, editors, translators, journalists, reviewers, booksellers, small presses, and mainstream publishers. American women were involved in almost all these roles, but in most cases their work was invisible if not silent. They were often intermediaries between readers and books, mediators between two cultures, and facilitators of professional and literary exchange.
The Right Bank: The American Library in Paris
One scholar writing about Paris during the 1920s characterized the literary geography of the city as being divided by the Seine: "The Left Bank, aristocratic and rustic, studious and bohemian, . . . was the elected domain of poets and writers with a small audience. ... It was contrasted then, more than today, to the Right Bank, seat of elegance and of pleasure, of luxury and of success literature."2 The ' Right Bank was also...