Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen, eds. Publishers, Censors and Collectors in the European Book Trade, 1650-1750.

Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen, eds. Publishers, Censors and Collectors in the European Book Trade, 1650-1750. Library of the Written Word, The Handpress World, vol. 126. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2024. 325 pages. ISBN 9789004691933. US $227 (hardcover).

Brill’s Library of the Written Word is a gold standard scholarly book history series. This volume, Publishers, Censors and Collectors in the European Book Trade, 1650-1750 , contains twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the twelfth annual book history conference hosted by the Universal Short Title Catalogue project at the University of St Andrews in 2019. The volume is divided into three parts: “Publishing Strategies,” “Censorship and Evasion,” and “Auctions, Collections, and Catalogues.” Ably edited by Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen, this collection sheds new light on an understudied period of book history and interrogates commonly held assumptions about the Enlightenment’s impact on the European book trade.

The first section focuses on ephemeral texts such as pamphlets, advertisements, schoolbooks, and periodicals. Jeroen Salman examines publishing strategies in the Dutch medical market between 1660 and 1770. His essay, bridging book history and medical history, analyzes the books, flyers, pamphlets, and posters that medical practitioners used as educational and promotional tools. Salman reveals that Dutch booksellers often sold medicines and remedies alongside books; however, booksellers who sold medicines did not sell medical books and vice versa. Xevi Camprubí’s essay is devoted to education, literacy, and the production of schoolbooks in early modern Catalonia. Through extensive archival research, Camprubí reveals that from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Catalonia boasted a public and cost-free education system provided by local councils for children from the lower and middle classes, with schoolbooks supplied by the local print trade. Very few copies survive from this vast output of educational materials. The Enlightenment did not bring progress to Catalonia, but rather oppression and downturn: the absolutist Bourbon regime of King Philip V caused a steep decline in Catalan education and literacy rates after 1714. Working from a large corpus of over five hundred printed works, Doris Gruber in her essay explores the cometary apparition of 1743-4 and the communicative role of periodical journals in the Holy Roman Empire. Her research suggests that discussions of the nature and meaning of comets took place in older media types like books and pamphlets, rather than in periodicals. 

Censorship and clandestine publication in the early eighteenth century were complex, as the essays in the second section of the volume demonstrate. Leonardo Anatrini examines, with great erudition, how the 1655-56 edition of Galileo’s Opera omnia was produced despite Church condemnation, by a publisher with no scientific expertise and an Aristotelian editor. Anatrini demonstrates that the Bolognese edition of Galileo’s works was a scientific endeavor that also reaffirmed the political prestige of the Grand Ducal family, to whom the book was dedicated. In their surprising and richly documented essay, Alberto José Campillo Pardo and Idalia García focus on censorship and the circulation of medical and scientific books in New Spain and New Granada. Drawing on records of the Inquisition, testimonies held in the General Archive of Mexico, and memorias, or inventories of book barrels and boxes that travelled through the Spanish Empire, Campillo Pardo and García discover that the Inquisition did not impede, but rather actively encouraged the circulation of medical and scientific books in the colonies. For example, Dominican monasteries acquired books on medicine, obstetrics, and anatomy for use in infirmaries serving the local population. Scientific works circulated freely because they were considered useful for the development of society in the Spanish empire. Mona Garloff traces the Protestant bookseller Johann Friedrich Rüdiger’s struggles to enter the Catholic-dominated book trade in Prague. Her essay counteracts the Prussian-centric view of the Holy Roman Empire in the eighteenth century and underscores the need to look beyond traditional corpuses of Enlightenment literature to understand book trade practices of the day. Garloff helps bridge a gap in knowledge of distribution and retail practices through her analysis of Rüdiger’s challenging long-distance trade strategies. The second part of the volume closes with an essay by Dominique Varry, who asserts that pirated editions formed a huge share of French book production, but did not enter legal deposit and so are less likely to be represented in national libraries and traditional bibliographies. Varry discusses the practice of permission tacite, by which French authorities allowed works not deemed serious enough to be granted a royal privilege to be printed in France. Such works often appeared with false places of publication on their title pages, but as Varry reveals: “[c]ontrary to common belief, a false imprint is not by definition synonymous with illegality” (p. 185). If we take pirated production into consideration, as Varry urges, the understudied Lyon printer and bookseller Geoffroy Regnault may in fact have been one of the most important printers of the century. 

Auctions, catalogues, private collections, and their creators are the subjects of the essays in the final section of the volume. Jessica G. Purdy examines two parish libraries in Lincolnshire and Lancashire to understand religious divisions, education, and moral instruction in early modern England. Both made extensive use of the secondhand book market to build their collections, and stocked controversial works so that parishioners could learn about and ultimately refute religious opposition. How and why did English books make their way in European markets, and were they significant in number? Hanne de Lange answers these questions in her analysis of a large corpus of Danish and Dutch auction catalogues published between 1650 and 1720 and concludes that English-printed books formed only a fraction of most collections, likely owing to the relatively low status of the English language at the time and unfamiliarity with English among most European publics. Philippe Bernhard Schmid’s microhistory of book auctions in Lübeck reveals the roles played by the learned community, city officials, and the Lutheran Church in the regulation of book auctions. His analysis of the city council’s manuscript minutes and other sources, including the buildings in which auctions took place, shows that book auctions were not just about selling books. Rather, auction culture was “essentially a culture of commemoration”, in which printed catalogues became “public memorials for the dead” (pp. 251, 257). Similarly, Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, in her case study of Sir Hans Sloane’s massive collection of books and manuscripts, contends that libraries were a form of legacy building—even those of private individuals like Sloane were “public- and often future-oriented” (p. 313). In addition to their concern with legacy, Enlightenment libraries were collaborative endeavors, sites of knowledge creation, and a locus for interaction between books and objects. Helwi Blom, drawing on her work with the MEDIATE digital humanities project, analyzes a corpus of 3,500 private library catalogues published in France between 1600 and 1830. Blom reveals the “Parisian booksellers” five-part thematic system of classification, first developed around 1700, was not as widely adopted as previously thought. Catalogues were more often organized by format, and commercial considerations played a much wider role in how books were listed in comparison to thematic arrangements inspired by Enlightenment philosophy.

In sum, Publishers, Censors and Collectors in The European Book Trade, 1650-1750 showcases the robust work of scholars analyzing large and diverse corpora of printed, manuscript, and archival sources, and overturns assumptions about how Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment forces impacted the book trade. Ann-Marie Hansen and Arthur der Weduwen’s engrossing and well-curated collection of essays is worth a close read. 

Ruth-Ellen St. Onge, McMaster University