God's Plagiarist is an entertaining account of the abbe
Jacques-Paul Migne, one of the great entrepreneurs of the
nineteenth century. Tracing Migne's life between 1840 and 1870, a
period of robust economic growth in France, Howard Bloch reveals
how the abbe Migne founded one of the most extensive publishing
ventures of all time. Migne harnessed a will of iron and boundless
personal energy to the latest innovations in print technology and
marketing. Most famous for his massive 469-volume edition of the
Church Fathers, Migne was the founder of the Ateliers catholiques
of Paris and owned a total of ten newspapers during the course of
his life. Bloch shows how closely Migne's activities in the
newspaper world coincided with his editing and marketing of the
Church Fathers. He sold the Fathers by means of advertising and
merchandising ploys so creative and modern that Bloch is able to
link Migne and his methods to the rise of wholesale exchange and
large department stores in Paris. Migne's assembly-line production
and innovative pyramid sales schemes placed him a the forefront of
France's new commerce. And yet, Migne had a lengthy police record
and was characterized by the police as one of the great "schemers"
of the century. This priest-entrepreneur put the most questionable
of business practices in the service of his devotion to
Catholicism. He was run in for bribery, hounded because of
irregularities in the licensing of his papers, and continually
being sued for plagiarism. He employed priests who could not find
work elsewhere and paid them such low wages that they were
considered a constant source of political unrest. Migne trafficked
illegally in masses and frequently reprinted editionsthat were not
in the public domain. Despite his years under police scrutiny, he
does, however, appear to have been a saintly schemer, whose
activities on the margin of the law were motivated by a greater
good. Part detective novel, part mortality tale, Bloch's narrative
not only will interest scholars of nineteenth-century French
intellectual history but will appeal also to general readers
interested in the history of publishing or just a good historical
yarn.
General
Imprint: |
University of Chicago Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
May 1994 |
First published: |
May 1994 |
Authors: |
R.Howard Bloch
|
Dimensions: |
224 x 152 x 2mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
162 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-226-05970-9 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-226-05970-7 |
Barcode: |
9780226059709 |
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!