This is the story of how the most profoundly influential book of
the 18th century actually reached most of its readers. The quarto
edition of Diderot's great work put out between 1777 and 1779 by a
consortium of French and Swiss publishers - a speculation inspired
by the success of the Encyclopedie in the more expensive original
folio version - can be studied from its inception to the final
winding-up of accounts through the luckily preserved records of the
Swiss partner, the Societe typographique de Neuchatel. It was a
mass-market operation beyond any previous publishing venture, and
its logistics strained the entire French and Swiss printing trades
to the limits of existing technology. The printing was farmed out
to dozens of presses, and the very wages of ragpickers were driven
up by the ensuing paper shortage. While the Lyons and Neuchatel
partners traded insults about the quality of each other's printing
jobs ("Your volume 6 is abominable"), the compositors and pressmen
themselves maintained an idiosyncratic, "task-oriented" pace fully
documented in the STN records - which actually allow us to identify
the man responsible for a thumbprint in volume 15. Advertisements
in leading European journals announced that "this book makes it
unnecessary to read practically all others"; meanwhile the editor
hired by the Lyons partner had set to work "improving" Diderot's
text until the subscribers complained. The result of this amazing
ballet of activity was of course the diffusion of Enlightenment -
not, Darnton finds, among the rising industrial bourgeoisie, but
primarily among the more genteel professionals who were to come
into their own some decades after the Revolution. Darnton's
intricate searchings through subscription accounts and wage-books,
though chiefly directed toward bibliographical historians, turn up
an incredible vein of material for the study of labor history, the
process of intellectual dissemination, and the "uneven march of
capitalism" on the eve of the Revolution. The extensive
untranslated French quotations will keep this from some of the
audience it deserves, but it is a significant addition to the
existing resources for the study of how books actually find their
way into our hands. (Kirkus Reviews)
A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in
publishing. Darnton's history of the "Encyclopedie" is such an
occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the
French genre of "histoire du livre," and at the same time he tracks
the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form
of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into
books and with the way books were made and distributed in the
business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale,
a history of the process of civilization.
In tracing the publishing story of Diderot's "Encyclopedie,"
Darnton uses new sources--the papers of eighteenth-century
publishers--that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems
long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of
literature and the technology of its production affected the
substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of
the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book
dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural
communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it
fit into the political as well as the economic systems of
prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched
on this vast range of activities because books were products of
artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas,
and elements in political and religious conflict.
The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of
penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old
Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so
he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society
rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that
first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas.
And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas,
ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the
diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in
which the Enlightenment had flourished.
Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn
without reference to this work. Darnton has written an
indispensable book for historians of modern Europe. "
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