The twenty-five essays in this volume edited by Shanti Graheli, part of a series edited by Andrew Pettegree, excavate the practices by which early modern people printed, marketed, and sold books. Pettegree and Graheli's introduction tasks the volume with investigating printers’ and booksellers’ strategies for survival: “innovation or caution; individuality or collaboration; specialism or diversity” (11). By demonstrating that the development of print was driven by the economic and practical interests of those doing the printing, selling, and buying, this volume offers an alternative to scholarship that reads the history of print primarily through the lenses of the history of ideas, religion, or humanism. The volume's strength lies in its geographic and methodological breadth. Individual essays constitute case studies, opening micro-historical windows into the worlds in which books were made and used across Europe between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The challenge of including twenty-five strong individual essays is that of collecting them into a cohesive volume. In part 1, “Debt Economies and Bookselling Risks,” the first two essays, Lucas Burkart's study of the fifteenth-century Basel printer Michel Wenssler and Lorenz Böninger's essay on Venetian incunabula in Florentine bookshops, underscore the centrality of commercial and social networks to early print production. The following two essays, Jeremiah Dittmar's quantitative analysis of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century book prices and Marius Buning's examination of the factors motivating seventeenth-century Dutch printers to seek state privileges, are illuminating in their own right, but they sit uneasily alongside the previous two.
Each essay in part 2, “The Day-to-Day Practices of Book Buying and Selling,” illustrates a selling strategy. Philip Tromans asserts that English book buyers were able to flip through books before purchasing them. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba shows that printers in seventeenth-century Kraków imitated Roman models to sell guidebooks to pilgrims in 1603. And Daniel Bellingradt demonstrates that late eighteenth-century Dutch booksellers took advantage of a lottery craze to move slow-selling stock.
The essays in part three, “Selling Strategies,” further explore how printers and booksellers capitalized on known entities—books, scholars, even cities—to market their wares. Jamie Cumby examines the career of Luxembourg de Gabiano, a successful publisher with little real interest in books, to depict the merchant-monopolized world of legal printing in sixteenth-century Lyon. Martine Furno examines the provenance of Robert Estienne's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Magdalena Komorowska analyzes how sixteenth-century Polish printers adapted postils for Catholic buyers. Domenico Ciccarello studies book bartering in Francesco Ciotti's early seventeenth-century Venetian business. Vivienne Dunstan surveys the structures of bookselling in Scotland around 1800. And Drew Thomas examines how printers fraudulently used the Wittenberg brand to advertise their books.
Part 4 is organized around a kind of evidence, “Lists and Inventories,” from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Based on inquisitorial archives, Renaud Adam hypothesizes about which readers frequented the Brussels bookshop of Michiel van Hamont. Natale Vacalebre uses Perugian Luciano Pasini's inventory to explore the networks among men of letters in Perugia and those in Rome. Amelie Roper uses Georg Willer's Augsburg music stock catalogue to investigate the shelf lives of music books. And Jean-Paul Pittion analyzes a notarial deed for Daniel Delerpinière to determine Protestant book tastes in Saumur. In part 5, “New Markets,” the volume addresses innovation in the seventeenth century. Jan Hillgärtner describes the development of newspapers in the Holy Roman Empire. Arthur der Weduwen mines Amsterdam newspaper advertisements for evidence of networks among booksellers and publishers. Idalia Garcia surveys documentary evidence for the circulation of books in New Spain. And Jason McElligott uses the history of advertising and offices of intelligence to shed light on the business of newsbooks in England.
In the final section, “Modern Book Markets,” John Sibbald studies Thomas Frognall Dibdin's career to highlight the interrelations between book-collecting and bibliography. And Falk Eisermann mines the archives of the Royal Library in Berlin to identify an invaluable but missing copy of the Articella printed in 1481.
These essays intervene into conversations about religion, state power, colonialism, and humanism as they unearth the details of how people earned livings in the world of books. The volume both showcases the range of evidence available and prompts us to delve further into geographically and historically specific commercial practices and the range of cultural networks that supported them.
