One of the First French Female Booksellers
MONNIER, Adrienne. Souvenirs De Londres. Paris: Mercure de France. 1957.
8vo. Original card wrappers with red and black title lettering on spine; pages untrimmed and partially unopened; pp. [vi], 105, [4]; spine slightly sunned with preliminaries minimally toned; otherwise near fine.
First edition.
"C'est a cause de Debussy que je suis allee a Londres.." (It was because of Debussy that I went to London...)".
Adrienne Monnier was a pivotal figure in the Modernist creative scene in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and was amoung the first woman in France to found her own bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres. She was also the longtime lover of Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company, responsible for the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce in 1922 and a bookshop which also lined the Rue de l'Odéon.
Souvenirs de Londres details Monnier's experience in England and prints an eight-page account of Monnier's visit with T.S. Eliot, whose poetry she published in her French language review, Le Navire d'Argent (The Silver Ship). A French-language translation (prepared by both Monnier and Beach) of T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock appeared in the reviews first issue in May 1925. Subsequent editions also enabled the presentation of works by Ernest Hemingway to a French audience. As promised by the front cover, it also includes a letter to Michael Leiris, Surrealist writer and an essential member of the College of Sociology with Georges Bataille.
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