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

acknowledgments The research for this book began more than two decades ago when I spent eighteen months working in the archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel at the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire in Neuchâtel. I owe a large debt of gratitude to all the librarians who assisted me with my research, above all, to Jacques Rychner and Michel Schlup, the directors of the library, and to Maryse Schmidt-Surdez, the curator of manuscripts. After having completed my initial research in Neuchâtel, I had the good fortune to receive help and guidance from numerous colleagues in Europe: Mark Lehmstedt in Leipzig, who taught me a great deal about the history of the German book trade and who supplied me with several invaluable leads in my research on the Hamburg bookseller Jean-Guillaume Virchaux; Anne Saada in Paris, who sent me a copy of Virchaux’s catalogue, which she had unearthed at the State and University Library of Lower Saxony in Göttingen; Jürgen Sielemann in Hamburg, who helped me locate documents about Virchaux in the State Archives of Hamburg; Renato Pasta in Florence, who provided me with references to studies of the French book trade in Italy; James Raven in Essex, who read and critiqued an earlier version of my book and to whom I owe the idea for the title; Pamela Selwyn in Berlin, who dug up and transmitted to me an important letter from the Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai to the STN; Christine Haug and Johannes Frimmel in Munich, who helped me locate illustrations for the book; and Simon Burrows and Mark Curran in Leeds, who are preparing a database on the STN. My thanks to both of the latter for agreeing to share some of their data with me and to Mark Curran for his astute and careful reading of my manuscript. On this side of the Atlantic, I have incurred a large debt of gratitude to Gary Hentzi of Baruch College (City University of New York), a stalwart friend who patiently read through my manuscript at various stages of its evolution ; to Madeleine Dobie of Columbia University; to William Stenhouse of Yeshiva University; to Andrew Clark and Thierry Rigogne of the Fordham 382 acknowledgments Eighteenth-Century Seminar; and to Jerry Singerman, Caroline Winschel, and Noreen O’Connor, my editors at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Special thanks are due to my former professors at Princeton University, the late Lawrence Stone, Natalie Davis, and to Anthony Grafton, who has been unwavering in his support of this project. The largest debt of all, however, I owe to my mentor Robert Darnton, who introduced me to the riches of the STN archives and whose pioneering work on the literary market and the circulation of ideas in Old Regime France has been a model for my own work. Finally, in addition to the debts that I owe to individuals, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of several institutions: the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Program, which supported my original research trip to Switzerland; the Annenberg Foundation, which awarded me a fellowship so that I could spend a semester at the University of Pennsylvania working under the direction of Elihu Katz; and Yeshiva University, my home institution, which granted me several sabbatical leaves. It seems fitting that a book about cultural mediation and linguistic border crossing should have evolved out of collaboration with friends and colleagues in so many different countries. This book, however, is not only about those subjects; it also exemplifies them. To write in English on the literary transfer between France and Germany is, in itself, a work of translation. As I was writing the book, I would often think of my mother, Njuty Greenberg Freedman, for whom the challenge of translation was not a scholarly exercise but an aspect of her daily existence. Born in 1923 in the Baltic port city of Riga, where she attended German schools, she spoke German with her Rigaborn mother, Russian and Yiddish with her Saint Petersburg–born father, and Latvian with her Latvian governess. Her quadrilingual household was a microcosm of polyglot Riga, which, in turn, was a microcosm of the nowvanished world of prewar central and eastern Europe. Growing up in that environment, she mediated between cultures and crossed linguistic borders with an ease and assurance that I could never hope to match. The inspiration for this book I owe to her example. ...

Share