A Companion to the History of the Book (46 page)

For the German sociologist Rolf Engelsing, the growth in the number of readers, combined with an enormous increase and diversification in the number of titles, was reason enough to speak of a reading revolution. In the German states, this took place in the second half of the eighteenth century. The use of Latin, the language of scholars, diminished in favor of the vernacular. New genres appeared on the market, such as periodicals, novels, and more general works. Moreover, booksellers founded commercial circulating libraries enabling them to provide less wealthy customers with books; reading societies appeared which likewise reached new reading groups. The reading public began reading in a different way: from endlessly and intensively re-reading and memorizing a limited group of predominantly devotional writings to extensively reading a larger, more varied, and newer set of texts (Engelsing 1974). This reading revolution must have occurred in the rest of Europe too, although opinions differ as to how and when it occurred (van Delft and de Wolf 2003).

To discover what was read in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is important to distinguish between scholars and the bourgeois middle classes. An international scholarly community existed in Europe from the age of Erasmus and before. The significance of this Republic of Letters really manifested itself in the seventeenth century. The mechanization of the world picture, combined with new empirical and Cartesian research methods, led to an explosive growth of scholarly publications. The language of these cosmopolitan scholars was initially Latin and later French. From the last decades of the seventeenth century, their exchange of ideas took place in learned journals.

The oldest learned journal in Europe is
the Journal des savants
(1665) edited by Denis de Sallo. Following its example, Italy started the
Giornale de’ letterati
(1668); Leipzig got its
Acta eruditorum
(1682). Every self-respecting university founded an academy of sciences that was to guarantee free scholarly activity. Research results were invariably recorded in learned journals. Thus,
Commentarii academiae scientiarum imperialis Petro-politanae
(1726) appeared under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and almost directly after its foundation, the University of Göttingen started its
Göttingische Zeitungen von Gelehrte Sachen
(1739).

Most learned journals, however, were started on the initiative of a scholar or a bookseller. It was in the bookseller’s interest to publish such journals which could act as a form of showcase to display their wares to potential customers. The learned journals had a freer format than institutional journals, although they were comparable as regards content due to the noticeable presence of the many book reviews. In the Netherlands, the French scholar Pierre Bayle, settled in Rotterdam because of the intellectual climate, started his famous
Nouvelles de la république des lettres
(1684). Afterwards, a great many learned journals, or “bibliothèques” as they were often called, were to follow.

Of course, not only scholars read journals. The average citizen read his newspaper, and informed as well as entertained himself by means of periodicals. The
Gazette de France
(1631), the
Leipziger Zeitung
(1660), the
Oprechte Haerlemse courant
(1662), and the
Gaceta de Madrid
(1697) are amongst the earliest newspapers. As early as the seventeenth century, the first satirical magazines appeared in which authors criticized the events of their time in scarcely veiled ways. By contrast, ’Spectators’, which started to appear from the early eighteenth century, had a more didactic–moralistic character. These very popular essay magazines were named after the renowned British
Spectator
of Addison and Steele. In Italy, the famous
Il caffè
(1764–66) appeared, not coincidentally named after the coffee house. This periodical is generally considered to be the precursor of the modern cultural and philosophical magazines in Italy (Santoro 2003: 112–13).

Women and children were identified as new reading groups, evidenced by the introduction of children’s and women’s magazines. Thus, publications such as the
Magasin des enfants
(1756) and the
Magasin des jeunes dames
(1772), educational literature written by Marie le Prince de Beaumont, were snapped up greedily throughout Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, every European country was familiar with a wide range of periodicals in the fields of literature, fashion, music, theater, and the fine arts. The originally broadly oriented learned journals changed into special interest magazines concerned with, for example, psychology, educational theory, technology, or physics.

From the seventeenth century onward, the European citizen also read novels. In France, in particular, the novel developed early, with highlights such as
Cassandre
(1642) by La Calprenède and
Le Roman comique
(1651) by Paul Scarron. Annually, on average, twelve novels were published, which soon found their way to foreign countries in translation. In the next century, this genre would reach full maturity. On the cultural fringe, pornographic and “philosophical” works were written. Both
La puttana errante
(c.l650), attributed to Pietro Arentino, and
l’Ecole des filles
(1655) obtained international fame. These texts marked the beginning of a series of highly sought-after, albeit forbidden books. Nevertheless, the Bible and devotional literature always remained popular throughout Europe. Publishers were always interested in such lucrative religious publishing projects. Marc-Michel Rey of Amsterdam, known for his daring editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other anti-religious writings, made no bones about publishing hymn books. Besides this, in politically turbulent times, people read leaflets and pamphlets of which, at the time of the French Revolution alone, close to ten thousand titles were published (Darnton and Roche 1989: 165).

For the reader at the end of the seventeenth century there was so much knowledge available that books were needed in which that knowledge was systematically organized. The
Grand dictionnaire historique
(1674) by the French scholar Louis Moréri was the first encyclopedic reference work, followed shortly afterwards by the
Dictionnaire historique et critique
(1697) by Pierre Bayle. The demand for works like this was such that publication of encyclopedias in the vernacular was also profitable, such as the unfinished
Biblioteca universale sacro-profana
(1701) by the Venetian Vincenzo Coronelli and the
Grosse vollständige Universallexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste
(1732), popular in the German states, by the Leipzig publisher–bookseller Johann Heinrich Zedler. The book of books, however, was the 38-volume
Encyclopédie
(1751) in folio format by Diderot and d’Alembert. This monument of Enlightenment publishing was the product of the efforts of 135 “encyclopedists,” amongst whom were Voltaire, d’Holbach, and Rousseau, who used their entries to argue for economic, political, and religious reform.

Although the anti-clerical and atheistic passages led to severe penalties and stiff fines, the
Encyclopédie
became one of the bestselling reference works of the century. On the 25,000 copies printed, the publisher–booksellers made a fortune. The competition was ferocious, especially when Fortuné-Barthélémy de Felice in Switzerland started his 58-volume
Encyclopédie d’Yverdon.
Here, too, a choice selection of leading international authors collaborated. Anticipating the wishes of the reader, the publisher chose the handier quarto format. The more compact composition of the entries and the more moderate theological opinions also ensured an unprecedented number of sales in northern Europe (Darnton 1979).

The Emancipation of Writers

By early in the seventeenth century, writers had begun to resist the power of the publishers. Increasingly, they wished to be paid for the products of their pens. Traditionally, they received remuneration by dedicating their texts to a prince who, flattered by the great honor lavished on him in the panegyric, would reward the author financially as a patron. Publishers, too, made use of this kind of funding. Yet most of the writers got little or nothing for their work. At best, they received a number of “author’s copies.”

The publisher received the full right to exploit the ideas of the writer. In France, this right was coupled to a strict system of privileges; in the Dutch Republic, publishers were free to apply for a printing privilege. With such a patent they had, for a given period and within the territorial boundaries, the exclusive right to do what they saw fit with the copy. For the rest, the work was a free commodity. Therefore, a fierce struggle arose between internationally operating publisher–booksellers in which they competed with each other with many illegal editions of books
(contrefaçons).
Because they could also apply for a privilege for these piracies, in the Electorate of Saxony, for example, they could prevent the original edition from being sold at the
Leipziger Buchmesse.
Piracy functioned here, as in other countries, as a corrective principle in the market against monopolies, inadequate distribution, and high prices.

Initially, the Dutch publishers in particular were guilty of aggressive piratical practices. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Lyon, Rouen, Avignon, Trévoux, Geneva, and Neuchâtel, too, were places infamous for pirate printing (Fouché et al. 2002). In the Principality of Liège, Bassompierre went to work so shamelessly that in 1772 he put a publication of the works of Montesquieu on the market with not only his own printer’s device but also the complete impressum of its original London publisher, Nourse. In Vienna in 1775, Maria Theresa forbade booksellers to jeopardize the domestic book trade, arts and sciences by their publications, but in doing so she gave the court printer, Thomas von Trattner, permission to reprint illegally everything in the large Habsburg empire he deemed worthwhile – and that was a great deal. It made him the greatest pirate-printer in Europe.

Such practices contributed to the self-assurance of a growing legion of writers who had to live off their writing. For a long time, their reputation demanded that they kept pretending to perform their intellectual labor solely as a pastime, in addition to their proper jobs as clergymen, scholars, doctors, and so on. But, around the turn of the century, an increasing number of writers started to demand appropriate payment. They negotiated hard with their publisher about their honorarium. In 1748, Samuel Formey, a Huguenot refugee and scholar living in Berlin, who maintained contacts with innumerable booksellers, was given the following choice by the Dutch publisher Elie Luzac for his work as editor in chief of the
Bibliothèque impartiale:
seven guilders per sheet and twenty complimentary copies, or eight guilders per sheet. The publisher thought this was a generous offer because, according to him, most writers usually got paid five guilders per quire (van Vliet 2005: 107). Diderot had a less flattering impression of Dutch publishers. In his
Voyage en Hollande
(1773), he complained: “Publishers in Holland print everything that is offered to them, but they never pay.”

The gap between author and publisher became wider than ever. For this reason, writers decided to take publication of their work into their own hands. The seventeenth-century orientalist Thomas Erpenius started his own printing business because he did not trust the stingy publishers who had their books printed as cheaply as possible. Early in the eighteenth century, the Dutch hack Jacob Campo Weyerman published many of his texts at his own expense, assured in advance of good sales. Other writers combined forces and founded collective publishing companies. The German scholar Leibniz, for example, resisted the publisher–booksellers who, according to him, were vultures. In 1715/16, plans were made for a
Societas subscriptoria inter eruditos
where scholars could subscribe to quality books for little money. This plan, however, was never put into practice. Later in the eighteenth century, scholars succeeded in starting their own bookstore–publishing business (Steiner 1998: 334). The emancipation of writers had reached a point at which they could begin to exploit their reputations in a modern way.

This development was accompanied by an increasing awareness that, initially at least, the author not the publisher owned the text. In 1643, the French playwright Pierre Corneille was one of the first authors who fought for his rights. Nevertheless, in France, it would take until the end of the eighteenth century before there was any question of copyright. Still in 1763, in his
Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie,
Diderot observed that, although censorship was strictly regulated, there was not a single law protecting the intellectual property of the writer. It was not until 1791 and 1793 that the
Déclarations des droits du génie
were adopted. This is almost a century after the Copyright Act of 1710 had in England designated writers as the rightful proprietors of their printed texts. In Norway and Denmark (1741) and Spain (1762), too, there was already some form of copyright. In the Netherlands this was not settled until the annexation by France (1812). In the German states, the
Allgemeine Landrecht für die Preussische Staaten
(1794) marked an important turning point in the history of copyright.

Constraints on Books

Everywhere in Europe the freedom of the press was curtailed by censorship, but the severity varied. The Dutch Republic was most tolerant, although even here freedom of the press definitely had its limits. Everyone was expected to endorse public Church doctrine, to refrain from undermining the business of the state, and to promote good morals. Otherwise, books were confiscated, sometimes burned, and both the author and publisher–printer were fined. They could also be imprisoned or exiled. It was a repressive form of censorship after the fact, resulting in measures prohibiting the distribution, possession, and reading of the book in question (van Delft and de Wolf 2003).