The American Library in Paris

The American Library in Paris was born from the wreckage of the First World War. When the conflict ended, the American Library Association had millions of books that had been shipped to France to support soldiers serving in the trenches and training camps. Rather than sending this massive collection back across the Atlantic, organizers decided to leave the books in Paris as a permanent memorial to those soldiers, founding the library in nineteen twenty with the motto, after the darkness of war, the light of books.