For the first time, the records of Parisian bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company have been digitized, revealing the reading habits of its famous patrons, such as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, thanks to a project led by the Center of Digital Humanities at Princeton University. At the Guardian, Alison Flood takes a look at what these handwritten records tell us. “The records reveal that Hemingway borrowed more than 90 books,” Flood writes, “from P.T. Barnum’s autobiography to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which he checked out for eight days in September 1929—the year D.H. Lawrence’s novel first appeared in France, 30 years before it was published in the U.S. In 1926, he borrowed a copy of Tom Jones’s Bull Fighting—the running of the bulls played a central part in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. He also bought a copy of his own novel A Farewell to Arms at the store.”
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