Adrienne Monnier and her Paris Book Shop Part 2

THE VERY RICH HOURS OF ADRIENNE MONNIER IN PARIS

     Adrienne Monnier the owner of the bookshop, "La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the legendary book store, "Shakespeare and Company," across the road from one another in Paris, France, were champions of literature, in their own country, and abroad. They were considered kindred spirits to well accomplished authors, and their shops were havens to escape the burdens of two wars and the Great Depression. They housed, encouraged, supported, financed, and promoted the writers they came to know, and they provided sustenance, to those who were rich in accomplishment but low on funds, and shared the meagre provisions they had, with those who would help them build their respective businesses; by offering their newly published books for the collection. There is an overview that was written by Adrienne Monnier, about the nature and intent of her business enterprise, and it is so eloquently and effectively written, that it summarizes what most of us, who sell old and new books every day, feel about the shop atmosphere, and the importance of offering books to "the eager and the passionate amongst us." Now in her words:

     "We founded La Maison des Amis des Livres with faith; each one of its details seems to us to correspond to a feeling, to a thought. Business, for us, has a moving and profound meaning," Monnier writes. The description of the business, translated from French, is included in the text produced by Richard McDougall, entitled "The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier," published by Charles Scribner's Sons, of New York, in 1976.

     "A shop seems to us to be a true magic chamber; at that instant when the passer-by crosses the threshold of the door that everyone can open, when he penetrates into that apparently impersonal place, nothing disguises the look of his face, the tone of his words; he accomplishes with a feeling of complete freedom an act that he believes to be without unforeseen consequences; there is a perfect correspondence between his external attitude and his profound self, and if we know how to observe him at that instant when he is only a stranger, we are able not and forever, to know him in his truth; he reveals all the good will with which he is endowed, that is to say, the degree to which he is accessible to the world, what he can give and receive, the exact rapport that exists between himself and other men." Monnier notes that, "This immediate and intuitive understanding, this private fixing of the soul, how easy they are in a shop, a place of transition between street and house! And what discoveries are possible in a bookshop, through which inevitably pass, amid the innumerable passers-by, the Pleiades, those among us who already seem a bit to be 'great blue persons,' and who, with a smile, give the justification for what we call our best hopes. Selling books, that seems to some people as banal as selling any sort of object or commodity, and based upon the same routine tradition that demands of the seller and the buyer only the gesture of exchanging money against the merchandise, a gesture that is accompanied generally, by a few phrases of politeness.

     "We think, first of all, that the faith we put into selling books can be put into all daily acts, one can carry on no matter what business, no matter what profession, with a satisfaction that at certain moments has a real lyricism. The human being who is perfectly adapted to his function, and who works in harmony with others, experiences a fullness of feeling that easily becomes exaltation when his is in rapport with people situated upon the same level of life as himself; once he can communicate and cause what he experiences to be felt, he is multiplied, he rises above himself and strives to be as much of a poet as he can; that elevation, that tenderness, is it not the state of grace in which everything is illuminated by an eternal meaning? But if every conscious person can be exalted upon his every thought of gain and work that is based upon books, have loved them with rapture and have believed in the infinite power of the most beautiful."

     The bookshop owner reports that, "Some mornings alone in our bookshop, surrounded only be books arranged in their cases, we have remained contemplating them for moments on end. After a moment our eyes, fixed upon them, saw only the vertical and oblique lines marking the edges of their backs, discreet lines set against the gray wall like the straight strokes drawn by the hand of a child. Before this elementary appearance that is charged with a should made up of all ideas and all images, we were pierced through by an emotion so powerful that it sometimes seemed to us that to write, to express our thoughts, would solace us; but at the moment when our hand sought for pen and paper - somebody entered, other people came afterward, and the faces of the day absorbed the great ardor of the morning. We have often felt that 'all grace of labor, and all honor, and genius,' as Claudel says in 'La Ville (The City),' were granted to us; in that work there are many other words besides that seem written for us, and we can say with Lala….'As gold is the sign of merchandise, merchandise is also a sign…..Of the need that summons it, of the effort that creates it,……And what you call exchange I call communion'."

     "When we found our house (shop) in November 1915, we had no business experience whatsoever, we did not even know bookkeeping, and along with that we were so afraid of passing for paltry tradespeople, that we pretended without end, to neglect our own interests, which was childishness besides," records Monnier. "It is ordinarily believed that life extinguishes enthusiasm, disappoints dreams, distorts first conceptions, and realizes a bit at random what has been offered to it. Nevertheless, we can declare that at the beginning of our undertaking, our faith and our enthusiasm were much less great than they are today. Our first idea was very modest; we sought only to start off a bookshop and a reading room devoted above all to modern works. We had very little money, and it was that detail that drove us to specialize in modern literature; if we had had a lot of money, it is certain that we would have wanted to buy everything that existed in respect to printed works and to realize a kind of National Library; we were convinced that the public demands a great quantity of books above all, and we thought that we had much audacity in daring to establish ourselves with hardly three thousand volumes, when some reading-room catalogs announced twenty-thousand volumes, fifty thousand, and even a hundred thousand of them! Truth is that only one of our walls was furnished with books; the others were decorated with pictures, with a large old desk; and with a chest of drawers in which we kept wrapping paper, string, and everything we did not know where to put; our chairs were old chairs from the country that we still have. This bookshop hardly had the look of a shop, and that was not on purpose; we were far from suspecting that people would congratulate us so much in the future for what seemed to us an unfortunate makeshift. We counted upon our first profits to increase our stock without end. These first profits were above all based upon the sale of new and secondhand books, for we did not dare to hope to find subscribers to our reading room until after several months."

     She suggests, "One of the great problems of our commercial beginnings was the construction of an outside display stand for the secondhand sale. This operation required our presence for more than five minutes, during which we were exposed to the looks of the passers-by; we had to carry outside the trestles, the case, then the books and the reviews, which were old things that had come for the most part from family libraries. The first time that we made that display we were aroused to the point of anxiety, and when the last pile had been arranged, we escaped hurriedly into the back room of the shop, just as if we had played a bad trick on the passers-by; we looked through a gap in the curtain at what was for us an extraordinary spectacle, the formation of a little group in front of the books; the faces that appeared behind the shop window sometimes made us burst out laughing, sometimes shiver with apprehensions; if those people were to come in, address words to us! And here was an old lady who took a volume from the display and prepared herself to accomplish that grave act of becoming our first purchaser; one of us decided to emerge from the back room and stammered a ceremonious good day to the lady, who, with a very natural manner, showed what she had chosen - it was Henry Greville's 'L'Avenir d' Aline (The Future of Aline)' marked at seventy-five centimes; she had the kindness not to haggle; if she had haggled the situation would have become painful; we would have been torn between the temptation to give her the volume so that the deal might be more quickly settled and the duty of maintaining our really very modest price to show her that we were serious booksellers who did not charge too much. It was necessary all the same to wrap the book, tie it up with string, take the money, give the change out of a franc; thank effusively. That old lady, at last perceived the extraordinary emotion that she was provoking; she went away more troubled than she wished to let it appear and did not come back."

     I will make another return visit to see Adrienne Monnier, in tomorrow's blog, and I would like to highlight some of the meetings she and Sylvia Beach had with famous writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliott, and James Joyce. It's enough to make you want to open your own bookshop.

     There are times these days, when it seems the printed hard copy book is on the way out, so to speak. I am a loyalist, who while embracing the advances of technology, will never, ever, abandon a real book for an electronic device that claims to be its equal. Like a real Christmas tree…..there's a beautiful aroma of print, paper and binding, that just doesn't emit from an electronic device. My favorite book related movie, of course, was "84 Charing Cross," and to be in the book shop that was depicted in that movie……the dream of dreams. To be the proprietor of a shop of that calibre……well, a fellow can ponder the possibility…..can't he? Hope you can find some time to visit again tomorrow, as we make another visit to La Maison des Amis des Livres, in Paris, via the words of shop owner, Adrienne Monnier.

     Thanks for showing your support for book sellers, antique dealers, collectors and all the others, who love history and all the wonderful relics it leaves behind to cheerfully hunt and gather. Books? Just the tip of the proverbial iceberg? There's just so darn much to collect.