In March of 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown, we—then-undergraduate Marissa Stinson and her Rider University professor Laurel Harris—visited the Special Collections at Princeton University’s Firestone Library to sift through boxes of Sylvia Beach’s papers . Rider is a fifteen-minute car ride down Route 206 from Beach’s hometown of Princeton. The accessibility of Beach’s and the Shakespeare and Company’s archives offered us a local connection to James Joyce’s iconic Irish modernist novel Ulysses (1922). Unsure of what we would find, we wound up spending the day particularly focused on Box 49, which includes a series of letters from around the world sent to Joyce in care of Beach in the 1920s and 1930s.

Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, once a hub for the Lost Generation, has become iconic in popular culture. [1] The continued cultural prominence of the bookshop and lending library is no accident. Beach knew that publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) would make Shakespeare and Company famous. Her memoir, published in 1959, is an exercise in name-dropping. She celebrates her relationships with writers, from Joyce to Gertrude Stein, and from Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright. And...

Gertrude Stein “was disappointed in me when I published Ulysses,” wrote Sylvia Beach in her 1959 memoir; “she even came with Alice to my bookshop to announce that they had transferred their membership to the American Library on the Right Bank.” [1] Stein’s move—from Shakespeare and Company to the American Library in Paris—has sustained the ongoing scholarly and popular representation of the two libraries as rivals, framing membership as an act of allegiance. And yet, the relationship between...

In September 1938, Reed Edwin Peggram, a Black American doctoral student at Harvard, moved to Paris to study decadence in nineteenth-century French literature at the Sorbonne. Soon after his arrival, he went to Shakespeare and Company and subscribed to the lending library, joining a long list of American expatriates in Paris who had made the pilgrimage to the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. In this article, I analyze the books he borrowed. Looking at other people’s bookshelves is quite an...

On July 27, 1927, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf, describing an unexpected encounter: "Today as I was driving down Oxford Street I saw a woman on a refuge, carrying [ To the] Lighthouse. She was an unknown woman – up from the country, I should think, and just been to Mudie’s or the Times, – and as the policeman held me up with his white glove I saw your name staring at me, Virginia Woolf, against the moving red buses, in Vanessa’s paraph of lettering. Then as I stayed (with my foot pressing down the clutch"

Using the modernist archive requires finding it first. The modernist archive does not live in one collection at one repository, such as a single university special collections department or one pivotal private library. Rather, the modernist archive is a term used to conceptualize a networked set of collections across many repositories in the United States or abroad. [1] The fact that the modernist archive is dispersed rather than centralized is critical because each institution’s holdings are more or less discoverable based on local application of user experience (UX) principles. Weave, a Journal of Library User Experience defines UX as employing a variety of methodologies to inform improvements to physical and digital space so that the user can easily access collections and services. Th US Department of Health and Human Services provides an overview of UX basics that, adapted for libraries and archives, would require repositories to identify their users, what they want, what skills they have, and which they don’t. According to Coral Sheldon-Hess, when UX is properly implemented, users of all levels of expertise can more easily access what they need. When UX is ignored or poorly applied, users are more likely to perpetuate pre-existing archival silences as well as less likely to have successful searches.

The past twenty years, along with the promises and perils of the digital turn, have seen a robust engagement with the modernist archive. One can map nearly point for point the rise of the New Modernist Studies and the Modernist Studies Association with the rise of digital resources that have reenergized the field: the Modernist Journals Project (1997), the Modernist Magazines Project (2006), the Blue Mountain Project (2012), the Modernist Versions Project (2012), ModNets (2013), and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2013), among others, have all contributed to the “ expansive” forces enlarging the universe of material modernity.