Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets

Introduction

Introduction This is a study of the transnational French book trade in Enlightenment Europe. As such, it belongs to what is known as the history of the book, a vast field of interdisciplinary research, whose subject matter embraces every aspect of the “communications circuit” between author and reader. It belongs to that field, and yet it does not fit snugly within it. The field of book history has long been divided into separate, self-contained national histories, from Johann Goldfriedrich’s early twentieth-century classic, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, to the multiauthor, multivolume Histoire de l’édition française published in the 1980s, to the more recent History of the Book in Britain. This study cuts across those divisions. Based on never-before-studied documents from the archive of an eighteenth-century publisher, it presents a challenge to the dominant national model of book history. Why challenge that model? In part, because books have not been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them. Even in the age of the wooden hand press, from the mid-fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, when books traveled in horse-drawn wagons along muddy, unpaved highways or in sailing vessels down poorly dredged, unevenly flowing rivers, they traversed great distances, connecting communities of readers across as well as within national borders. The geography of their diffusion cannot be folded neatly into the geography of nations, let alone that of states. Like the products of the wooden hand press, moreover, the booksellers of early modern Europe moved back and forth across national borders. Many of them would undertake long journeys to visit their customers in foreign lands, or they would travel to the famous fair at Frankfurt on Main, a rendezvous of the Latin book trade, which drew booksellers from beyond the Rhine and across the Alps until its decline during the Thirty Years’ War. Some of them established themselves permanently in foreign countries—Germans in Russia , Huguenots in the Low Countries, Frenchmen in London. And in such linguistic border areas as Switzerland, an important center of early modern printing, the journeymen typographers who tramped from one establishment to another in search of work made the cramped rooms of printing shops resound with the accents of different dialects and languages. In those noisy shops no less than in the quiet studies of scholars, books belonged to worlds in which cultures met and collided. Of course, not all the books printed in early modern Europe came from the presses of polyglot printing shops, traveled to international book fairs, and reached readers in distant lands. Some led a much more parochial existence. Books printed in German, for example, were unlikely to reach many readers who were not native speakers, because German occupied one of the lower rungs in the international hierarchy of modern literary languages, at least until the late eighteenth century when it began its rapid ascent. German books were mainly for Germans—a fact that publishers expressed typographically by printing German books in a separate type font, Fraktur rather than the international Roman. Even in Germany, however, indeed especially in Germany , the literary market absorbed books in other languages too—in Latin throughout the early modern period and in French beginning in the eighteenth century. And to those books in other languages were added during the course of the eighteenth century an increasing number of German translations of French books, so many, in fact, that contemporaries described the publishing houses of Leipzig as “translating factories.” By the last decades of the century, German translations and German originals, both of them printed in spiky Fraktur, and French books printed in elegantly rounded Roman were jostling for shelf space in bookshops all across the politically fragmented lands of the old Reich. While international and national typographical styles and French and German literature mingled promiscuously in the bookshops of eighteenthcentury Germany, other forms of cohabitation prevailed elsewhere. During the eighteenth century, booksellers in London published French books as well as English ones, but they also imported French books from the Continent, above all from the Low Countries; and booksellers up and down the Italian peninsula from Turin to Naples supplemented their stocks of Italian literature by importing French books from Switzerland. Bound to one another through commercial exchanges, the booksellers of the eighteenth century sent the products of their presses coursing through the circulatory system of the European book trade, and so gave new life to an old ideal, that of the...