1 hemingway's library - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

windswept street, this was a warm cheerful place with a stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new
books in the window, and the photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.(95)
Hemingway always retained very fond memories of Shakespeare and Company. He wrote Malcolm Cowley that his
education was based on books from Sylvia Beach's until he learned French and later Spanish.(96) In 1951 he wrote
to Carlos Baker about all the wonderful books from Sylvia Beach's and added that it was the place he loved best. It
was from there, he continued that he read Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky.(97) In turn, Sylvia
Beach wrote of Hemingway:
A customer we liked, one who gave us no trouble, was that young man you saw almost every morning over
there in a corner at Shakespeare and Company, reading the magazines or Captain Marryat or some other
book. This was Ernest Hemingway, who turned up in Paris, as I remember, later in 1921. My "best
customer," he called himself, a title that no one disputed with him. Great was our esteem for a customer
who was not only a regular visitor, but spent money on books, a trait very pleasing to the proprietor of a
small book business.(98)
Like the Oak Park Library, Shakespeare and Company allowed Hemingway to take books along on vacation
trips. "We're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them," the young
Hemingway enthusiastically reports to his wife, Hadley, in A Moveable Feast.(99) That he in fact take Sylvia
Beach's books with him on trips is confirmed by the note he wrote to her from the Hotel Taube in Austria in 1925,
telling her that they had read all of her books and would mail them to Paris if she wished.(100) Many years later,
Hemingway reminisced to Carlos Baker about how such fun it had been to go to the Austrian Voralberg where there
were only villagers and no Paris café characters and to spend the winter reading Stendhal, Flaubert and de
Maupassant.(101) Sylvia Beach's bookstore was not, however, Hemingway's only source of books in Paris. Soon
after his arrival in Paris, he learned where to find inexpensive second-hand copies of American books:
In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for
sale very cheap. The Tour D'Argent restaurant had a few rooms above the restaurant that they rented in
those days, giving the people who lived there a discount in the restaurant, and if the people who lived there
left any books behind there was a bookstall not far along the quai where the valet de chambre sold them and
you could buy them from the proprietress for a very few francs. She had no confidence in books written in
English, paid almost nothing for them, and sold them for a small quick profit .... After that bookstall near
the Tour D'Argent there were no others that sold American and English books until the quai des Grands
Augustins. There were several from there on to beyond the quai Voltaire that sold books they bought from
employees of the left bank hotels and especially the Hotel Voltaire which had a wealthier clientele than
most .... sometimes, if the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some
sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing.(102)
By the time that Hemingway's marriage to Hadley broke up in 1926, and he transported her possessions to her new
apartment in a hand-cart, it is certain that he had acquired a small library.
B. Key West
In the spring of 1928 Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline arrived in Key West, Florida. Whether or
not Hemingway brought books with him from Paris on this trip is not known. It is clear, however, that Hemingway
retained books he had purchased in Europe in the 1920's. In the Finca Vigía today, there is an insect- and
humidity-damaged copy of Don Pio's Ki ki ri ki! (item 5156) that is inscribed "Ernest Hemingway, Madrid 1923."
When this and similar volumes were brought from Paris is unknown, but when Pauline shipped her Spanish furniture
from Paris to Key West in 1931, books were included in the shipment. Lorine Thompson, a close friend of the
Hemingways in Key West, recalls that she and Pauline's sister, Jinny Pfeiffer, unpacked the shipment in the big
house on Whitehead Street, which the Hemingways had just purchased: "The furniture and things arrive from Paris
and Jinny and I put up the bed and the furniture, but we didn't open the books; we left that for Ernest to do.... He
brought quite a lot of books with him. There were quite a number of cartons of books and things that came."(103)
During his years in Key West Hemingway was a regular customer at Valladares' Bookstore, which had been
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