The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

Everything was closed, locked and deserted. “Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so.

In a report marked “Confidential”, she described the first days of the occupation. When German soldiers drew closer, she sent her staff to a city west of Paris for their safety. In the northern spring of 1940, Dorothy Reeder devised an evacuation plan. In fact, she and Hemingway shared the same publisher. The countess received her doctorate from the Sorbonne when she was 48.

In 1920, she’d been one of the original Library trustees, along with the writer Edith Wharton. The Library trustees returned to the US, leaving only one, Ohio’s Countess Clara de Chambrun who was married to a French count. Back in Canada, Evangeline wrote: “My life has been bound up with our Library for the 10 years I have been in Paris … through many lean days and times more hopeful and cheering that I cannot give up hope of returning to my work there some day.” Canadian and thus British subjects, they risked being imprisoned as enemy aliens. From September 1939 to June 1940, when the Nazis arrived in Paris, the Soldiers Service donated 100,000 books.Īs the Nazis approached, Reeder urged the Turnbulls to return home. When war broke out, the Turnbulls remained in Paris and wrapped care packages for soldiers.

Credit: Courtesy of Janet Skeslien CharlesĬataloguer Evangeline Turnbull and her daughter Olivia both worked at the Library. American Library in Paris director Dorothy Reeder categorising books in 1936.

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles