Preparing an American Library in Paris, Summer 1918
The Germans began firing on Paris again on 5 August 1918. That summer, Mary Josephine Booth — 42 years old and from Illinois — served with fellow recruits to the American Library Association's Library War Service as they prepared to open an American library in the war-scarred French capital. Pictures of that library are now available from the American Library in Paris via JSTOR.
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Booth was one of hundreds of librarians who went to war alongside American troops during the First World War.
She knew the sirens. At night she would jump out of bed at the Hotel Petrograd, dress, take what valuables she had and, if the shelling was especially fierce, retreat to the basement.
Daytime sirens did not move her: in her olive-green uniform she stayed at her post in an ornate building across the street from the Palais de l'Élysée. “We had to keep working to get the library ready to open,” she later wrote.
The work itself was bibliographic: unpacking and sorting the books that arrived from the home front, cataloguing titles without a Dewey Decimal reference guide, and deciding which volumes would go to “our boys in the front trenches.”