Rue de L'Odéon | Booksellers

Odéonia: The Country of Books | (Paris Was a Woman) Chapter 1
_Andrea Weiss

Twenty-three year old Adrienne Monnier realized a childhood dream in November 1915 when she opened a small bookshop on the rue de l'Odéon in the sixth arrondissement. Its location in the heart of the artistic and intellectual centre of Paris was no accident:

"The Left Bank called me and even now it does not cease to call me and to keep me. I cannot imagine that I could ever leave it, any more than an organ can leave the place that is assigned to it in the body." (Adrienne Monnier)

The story began in Paris on a cold, gusty March afternoon in 1917. A shy young woman named Sylvia Beach hesitated at the door of a Left Bank bookshop and lending library, La Maison des Amis des Livres. The owner, a self-assured young French writer and publisher named Adrienne Monnier, got up quickly from her desk and drew her visitor into the shop greeting her warmly. The two talked the afternoon away, each declaring love for the language and literature of the other.

In 1921 Shakespeare and Company moved around the corner so that it was almost directly opposite Adrienne's bookshop, and Sylvia moved into Adrienne's apartment a few doors away. Their friend, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) wrote:

"There was only one street in Paris for me, the rue de l'Odéon. It is association, I suppose, but I have always considered it one of the most beautiful streets in the world. It meant naturally Sylvia and Adrienne and the happy hours that I spent in their libraries."

Adrienne Monnier wrote:

"The young American displayed an original and most attaching personality. She spoke French fluently with...an energetic and incisive way of pronouncing words...In her conversation there were neither hesitations nor pauses; words never failed her; on occasion she deliberately invented them, she proceeded then by an adaption of English, by a mixture or extension of French vocables, all that with the exquisite sense of our language. Her finds were generally so happy, so charmingly funny, that they at once came into usage - our usage - as if they had always existed; one could not keep from repeating them, and one tried to imitate them. To sum it up, this young American had a great deal of humor, let us say more: she was humor itself." (p. 31)

The sister bookshops on the rue de l'Odéon soon became a cultural centre of Europe, serving as a gathering place where writers from all over the world met, collected their post and read the latest in the proliferation of literary magazines.

From the start, Sylvia and Adrienne were much more than booksellers. Adrienne, in particular, was determined to alter people's, and especially women's, reading habits and relation to books. In her essay, 'Les Amies des Livres', she offered a feminist analysis of women's relationship to books, and catered to that relationship in the way she ran her bookshop: she sold inexpensive volumes for curious readers rather than first editions for scholars and collectors, and allowed customers to take books home for a time before deciding whether to buy them.