The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II: Enlightenment Bestsellers by Simon Burrows (review)

Burrows's book seeks to "assess the validity of [a] heroic vision of late Enlightenment culture" (xvi) by raising the question of what types of texts eighteenth-century European readers actually consumed. The book is the second of two volumes––the first is by Mark Curran––attempting to refine our view of the Enlightenment through historical bibliometric data generated by the digital humanities French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe (FBTEE) project, a database containing transaction figures for the twenty-five years the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) did business (1769–1794). Approaching the data from an angle different from but complementary to Curran's, Burrows attempts to shed new light on the intellectual culture of the eighteenth century by examining STN's bestsellers. Burrows, like Curran, notes the limitations of meaningful information the raw data can provide, underscoring the vague and "fuzzy snapshot of reality" (39) that the mere compilation of raw data offers, and the impossibility of a single database to be, by itself, "representative of the wider book trade" (41). However, Burrows successfully counters these limitations by means of the varied analytical tools he employs to interpret the data. For example, Burrows takes advantage of the FBTEE database's filters to determine what insights can be gained by accounting for a range of factors such as site of origin for acquisitions, comparison of sales to different countries or to urban vs. provincial locations, differences between global, trade, and commercial sales, and the inclusion or exclusion of commissioned sales. In addition to filtering the data internally, Burrows moves beyond the FBTEE project's raw numbers by comparing them to information gleaned from other sources, such as eighteenth-century booksellers catalogs, or data generated by modern scholars in other studies. Moreover, Burrows adds historical and cultural context to the discussion of the data, focusing frequently on specific icons and figures of the period such as De France's Égide de Minerve, the "scandal-mongering pamphleteer" Rillet de Saussure (69), police inspector Joseph d'Hémery, or Besançon bookseller Charles-Antoine Charmet. Stylistically, Burrows's prose reads easily and smoothly, and he successfully finds a balance between data, analysis, context, and interpretation. The recurrence of the aforementioned icons and figures is vital not only as a contextualizing element to the statistical analysis, but also as a stylistic buffer that makes the copious data readable. As is the case with this work's companion volume, the text is eminently accessible, though the content by its nature will obviously be of greatest interest to a professional scholarly readership. A worthwhile addition to any dix-huitiémiste's library, this work will be invaluable for scholars specializing in the Enlightenment book trade.