Robert Darnton's "Pirating and Publishing" delves into the world of bookselling and publishing in 18th-century France. It explores the complex interplay between Parisian publishers with royal privileges and the entrepreneurial publishers of the 'Fertile Crescent' who engaged in widespread piracy. The book examines the lack of copyright and the resulting cutthroat competition, highlighting how this dynamic shaped the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas. Darnton uses extensive archival research, including 50,000 letters, to paint a vivid picture of this era's book trade, revealing the social and economic forces that fueled the spread of knowledge and the challenges faced by those involved. The book offers a unique perspective on the democratization of access to culture during this period.
L'Apparition du Livre, by Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, is a landmark work in book history. Published in 1958, it revolutionized the study of books by examining their production, distribution, and reception within their historical contexts. The book emphasizes the social and cultural significance of books, moving beyond a purely literary analysis. It explores the relationship between books and society, highlighting how books shaped and were shaped by their time. The work's interdisciplinary approach, combining historical analysis with insights from sociology and anthropology, has had a lasting impact on the field.
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged — tacitly or openly — that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.
Darnton's book Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford UP, 2021) focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters — lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists — this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.
Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast.
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