Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of the Enlightenment

Abstract

Forty-two years after the first of many monographs on the eighteenth-century book, Robert Darnton offered the companion volume to his penultimate study of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution based on the firm’s correspondence with its representative in France, Jean-François Favarger. The title under review, however, moves the focus from French booksellers to European publishers, mainly in the ‘fertile crescent’ from Amsterdam to Avignon, a region proximate to the continent’s largest reading public. These devious entrepreneurs printed copies of successful nouveautés (recent publications) whenever their sale in France could be undercut by cheaper editions. In a period without enforceable, universal copyright, this bootleg custom was widespread—and risky. Bankruptcies loomed large, including the STN’s own soon after 1783 when French authorities virtually sealed the country’s borders to these pirates and closed down the provincial booksellers who depended upon them. Illicit commerce in the Enlightenment’s livres philosophiques, also subject to censorship, had always been ruthless. ‘On the whole’, Darnton writes, ‘the foreign publishers operated under few constraints other than the marketplace’ in a distinctive form of swashbuckling capitalism.