The growth of social reading platforms such as Goodreads and LibraryThing enables us to analyze reading activity at very large scale and in remarkable detail. But twenty-first century systems give us a perspective only on contemporary readers. Meanwhile, the digitization of the lending library records of Shakespeare and Company (SC) provides a window into the reading activity of an earlier, smaller community in interwar Paris. In this article, we explore the extent to which we can make comparisons between the SC and Goodreads communities. By quantifying similarities and differences, we are able to identify patterns in how works have risen or fallen in popularity across these datasets. We can also measure differences in how works are received by measuring similarities and differences in co-reading patterns. Finally, by examining the complete networks of co-readership, we can observe changes in the overall structures of literary reception.

In her 1926 essay “Impassioned Prose,” Virginia Woolf seeks to distinguish herself from her Edwardian predecessors, writing that “they ignore [the mind’s] thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams . . . while prose itself . . . will be fit . . . to write nothing but the immortal works of Bradshaw and Baedeker.” Like her fellow modern novelists E. M. Forster and Henry James, like Mina Loy with her Lost Lunar Baedeker or T. S. Eliot with his “Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar,” Woolf mentions the famously popular Baedeker travel guides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Woolf here seems unconcerned with what the Baedekers and similar guidebooks have to say about changing patterns of tourism and travel, or about how they mediate the relationship between cultures. The content of travel guides—what Roland Barthes sees as the “disease of essence,” the tendency to reduce cultures to “types”—is not the issue for Woolf. Instead, Woolf uses the Baedekers to characterize the language of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy: a language perfect for the simplest forms of communication, but unsuited to creative expression. The “Bradshaw” to which Woolf refers is probably the Bradshaw railway guide—a textual form reduced to a list of times and city names. Bradshaws and Baedekers impart information, but they don’t express; they don’t, as she says, dream. Woolf defines the modern novel against the travel guide, yet the persistent invocation of guidebooks in fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries points to a deeper connection between them. While the modernist novel and the travel guide both claim to be totalizing genres that can more fully represent the reality of cities or countries, they each confront the limits of that endeavor. Both genres are characterized, I argue, by their selectiveness rather than by their expansiveness. While they attempt synecdochally to construct an encyclopedic portrait of a nation or metropolis, they are faced with the need to choose which people or places or events should be focused on, or, in the words of the Bradshaw, what “objects” are “worthy of attention.” Travel guides were themselves a relatively new genre in the early twentieth century, having only achieved widespread prominence in England in the 1860s and 1870s. And as befits a new genre, the form of the travel guide was still in flux in the interwar period. How should a guide be organized—by list, by geographic area, by landmarks—and what should it emphasize—history, basic logistical information, itineraries, or larger demographic data about city or country? The Baedeker model wound up winning out, becoming the popular choice at the time and the model for the travel guide of today, but if we return to the period of modernism we can see that the question of the proper form for the travel guide was still undecided. The guidebook, in the course of its evolution and in the enduring form that the Baedeker perfected, remains defined by the tension between objective totalizing knowledge and the need for a more personal selection.

Does the size of a novel determine the scale of the social world it represents? In the terms that increasingly frame our own social world, do long novels contain larger or more complex social networks than short ones? Caroline Levine suggests as much in her reading of network form in Victorian novels like Dickens’s Bleak House. Levine argues that the “sheer length” of such works allows them to reach insights that are “precluded by shorter narrative forms” about networks as “sprawling, overlapping, and indefinitely expanding processes of interconnectedness.” [1] This argument rightly rejects critics’ tendency to equate length with formlessness, but it also reflects the widespread assumption that nineteenth-century fiction is the place to look for compelling representations of networks. [2] Within modernist studies, the word network appears not primarily in analyses of narrative form but in discussions of the real-life networks —“of periodicals, of migration routes, of coteries and collectives”—that circulated and sustained the innovations of the avant-garde. [3] Network analysis also offers a powerful mode of intrinsic criticism, however, and it can help answer questions like the one with which I began by providing empirical measures of a novel’s social scale and density.