Books without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets by Jeffrey Freedman (review)

The uniquely comprehensive archive of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, already studied by Robert Darnton and others, has now provided Jeffrey Freedman with ample materials to explore a neglected aspect of eighteenth-century publishing history: the dissemination of French books in Germany. The Société operated a wholesale trade, mainly through the Easter book fair at Leipzig, and also a retail trade with booksellers at Hamburg, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Cologne, and Prague, whence books were sent to individual purchasers scattered over a wide area. After discussing in detail the commercial framework of the book trade, Freedman describes the characters and activities of four French booksellers located in Germany, who illustrate many of its difficulties. The Société seldom knew how securely established distant booksellers were, and how they sometimes suffered losses through unexpected bankruptcies. The dispatch of books was slow: merchandise sent from Basel down the Rhine to the Low Countries passed through thirty-eight customs posts; books that made the three-month journey from Neuchâtel to Prague were then halted for four to six weeks by notoriously suspicious customs officials. Some German states were tolerant, others guarded vigilantly against the import of livres philosophiques (a euphemism for pornography and irreligion), and at some places, including Cologne and Frankfurt, offending books were publicly burnt. The Société's Livres de commissions, a list of orders surviving complete from 1774 to 1785, enables Freedman to trace demand for books; bestsellers include Mercier's L'An 2440 and the Comte d'Albon's Discours politiques, which, revealingly, contains a sympathetic account of the Americans' war for independence. A chapter on the diminishing sale of French Bibles to Huguenots reveals that handsome folios were in much less demand than handy octavos, a sign of the general preference for small books. Freedman then looks at the diffusion of German books in French translation and especially at the publishing history of Friedrich Nicolai's novel Sebaldus Nothanker, examining the marketing strategies that helped to make the original a bestseller in Germany, discussing the theory and practice of translation, and noting that, after the French version had sold disappointingly, it was reissued under the alluringly scandalous title L'Intolérance ecclésiastique; ou, Les malheurs d'un hétérodoxe. This narrative reveals how in pre-Romantic times creativity was not confined to an original author but dispersed through various stages of the conception, composition, and dissemination of a text. The last chapter reconstructs the remarkable career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux, a bookseller in Hamburg, whose correspondence reveals much about the importance attached to the materiality of books; it follows Virchaux through his bankruptcy and his flight via St Petersburg and Berlin to a revolutionary career in Paris, concluding tentatively that these incongruous life phases are unified by the cosmopolitanism shown both by his book business and by his later politics. Altogether this is an outstanding, vivid, fine-grained, minutely researched, and highly readable study that makes an indispensable contribution to our knowledge of the diffusion of the Enlightenment.