In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

of Prerevolutionary France R O B E R T D A R N T O N qponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The pub lication of the Encyclopedic has long b e e nre cognize d as a turning point of the Enlighte nme nt.In pe rmittingDid e rot ’s te xt to appe ar in print, the state , howe ve rre luctantly and impe r­ fe ctly ,gave the philosophe s an opportunity to try the ir ware s in the marke t place of id e as. But what was the re sult of this break-through in the traditional restraints on the printed word in France? By concentrating on the duel between the encyclopedistes and the French authorities, scholars have told only half the story. The other half concerns some basic questions in the social history of ideas: how did publishers plan and execute editions in the eighteenth century? How well did works like the Encyclopedie sell? And who bought them? This essay is ad­ dressed to those questions. By recounting the life cycle of one book, it is intended to suggest some of the possibilities in the history of publishing, a field that has lain fallow too long despite its attractive location at the crossroads of intellectual, social, economic, and political history.1 Reprinted from the Am erican H istorical Review , 78 (1973): 1331-52. Copyright © 1975 by Robert Darnton. 3 4 I R O B E R T D A R N T O N qponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Whe n Did e rotand his pub lishe rsb roughtout the last volume of the Encyclopedic in 1772, the y had won more than a moral victory ove r the sy ste m for controlling Fre nch pub lishing. The first e d ition prob ab ly prod uce dab out 2,500,000 livre s in gross profits. But the gove rnme nt re fuse d to le t the b ook se ll ope nly , and most of the 4,225 se ts we nt to custome rs outsid e France .2 The se cond e d ition also se e ms to have b e e nprimarily a nonFrench affair. It was a folio reprint of the original text, produced in Geneva by a consortium of publishers allied with Charles Joseph Panckoucke of Paris. Its sales records have not survived, but its publishers originally hoped to market half of their 2,200 sets in France; and they had sold 1,330 sets throughout Europe when they settled their accounts in June 1775.3 So by that date only 3,000 copies of the first two editions, at the very most, existed in France. The country had not been inundated with Encyclopedies, despite the semilegal status granted to the book. But the publishing of the next editions—the three quarto and the two octavo printings of the original text—is a very different story; and unlike the publishing history of the first two editions, it can be told in detail, thanks to the papers of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel in Neuchatel, Switzerland. The story begins with Panckoucke, the extraordinary entrepreneur known as “the Atlas of the book trade,”4 and his system of alliances and alignments within the world of publishing and politics. In December 1768 Panckoucke bought from the original publishers the plates of the Encyclopedic and the rights to future editions of it. Precisely what these rights were is difficult to say. Panckoucke used the terms “droits” and “privilege” throughout his correspondence, but the government had revoked the formal privilege of the Encyclopedie in 1759, and the registers of privileges in the Bibliotheque nationale give no indication that it was ever restored. They do reveal that Panckoucke received a twelve-year privilege general on March 29, 1776, for a “Recueil des planches sur les sciences, arts et metiers,” which may have been enough to substantiate his claim to possess a kind of copyright.5 In any case, he asserted that claim in the most absolute manner, citing not only the contract by which he bought TheqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Ency clope d ic W ars / 5 out the original pub lishe rsb ut also the sanction of the Fre nch government...

pdf

Share