The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime

1. Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnėte Publication

1 Literary Commerce in the Age of Honnête Publication The investigation into writers and the book trade in the early mod-­ ern period has traditionally presented an exercise in the excavation of ori-­ gins, driven by the effort to unearth “primitive” instances of what would later develop as standard behavior for writers in the commercial publishing sphere. In his survey of the economic, social, and political realities defined by the printed book in seventeenth-­century Paris, Henri-­Jean Martin sud-­ denly describes a “prehistory” as soon as he turns to the question of “la condition d’auteur.” The focus on authorship instantly calls up the most un-­ derdeveloped aspects of a broad phenomenon that until then had seemed remarkable for its profuseness and penetration, as well as for the complexity of its mechanisms and networks.1 Why the pervading sense of incipience when the writer makes an appearance? One reason for such an impression, it seems to me, not only in Martin’s account but in others as well, is the marked tendency to conflate a general history of writers and publication with what is really a more specific history, that of writers’ moral and legal claims to compensation from libraires to whom they cede the rights to print and sell their works. Indeed, Martin’s incorporation of the Author into his study transforms it not just into a “prehistory” but more exactly into a “pre-­ history of droit d’auteur.” Referring to the payment that a writer received for the sale of his or her works, the latter term indicates not a generic but a particular contact with the book trade, one that certainly does not exhaust the range of possibilities. Nonetheless, it is characteristic of much historical work on authorship that payments are assumed to be something especially salient and fundamental. Martin then tells this aspect of the story largely through an enumera-­ tion of the sums obtained by writers in their transactions with libraires2 : Benserade’s 150 livres from Sommaville for Cléopâtre; La Calprenède’s 00 livres for Mithridate (also from Sommaville); Tristan’s 600 livres from 6 Chapter 1 Courbé and Billaine for three collections of verse (Les amours, oeuvres chré-­ tiennes, and Vers héroïques); and Scarron’s 1,000 livres from Quinet for the Roman comique, to name a few examples.3 Such figures have the disconcert-­ ing effect of seeming at the same time significantly low and significantly high, a fact that further underscores the nascence of the writer’s “condition” vis-­à­-­vis the book trade. They seem low to the degree that they stand out as artifacts of a distant age, elements in a life measured by a distinctly anti-­ quated set of standards. But the payments also appear high inasmuch as we cannot help but read them in contrast to an even more primordial moment when writers received nothing at all from the printers or booksellers who put their works into circulation, other than maybe a few dozen copies of the books in question. Martin will reference this earlier moment explicitly, but it could just as easily remain implicit in its function as a powerful, ever-­ present myth of authorial origins. When faced with any evidence of writers being monetarily compensated for the “sale” of their writings in the early modern period, whatever the actual sums may be, we instinctively situ-­ ate those transactions against a putative beginning when writers were not only unpaid but might be expected to contribute themselves to the printing costs.4 Moreover, the numbers always seem both highly illuminating and ut-­ terly impenetrable. They grab our attention as sharply focused glimpses into the daily lives of early modern gens de lettres, all the more tantalizing given the paucity of true-­life documentation on such matters. But the de-­ tail, for all its banality, also reminds us of the illusory nature of the insight the numbers appear to offer. For one thing, viewed from this side of three centuries of currency changes and inflation, they strike us as alien and in-­ convertible. They force the question: what do they amount to in twenty-­ first-­century dollars or euros? Yet most studies that rehearse these types of payments do not even try to establish modern equivalents for the amounts but seek to let the old numbers simply speak for themselves. What, though, can they tell us on their own? Some studies offer conversion systems, but with confusing, improbable, and arbitrary ratios they only...