A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution

by Robert Darnton

Overview

The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopédie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive access to a trove of documents-letters and documents from authors, publishers, printers, paper millers, type founders, ink manufacturers, smugglers, wagon drivers, warehousemen, and accountants-involving a publishing house in the Swiss town of Neuchatel to bring this world to life. Like other places on the periphery of France, Switzerland was a hotbed of piracy, carefully monitoring the demand for certain kinds of books and finding ways of fulfilling it. Focusing in particular on the diary of Jean-François Favarger, a traveling sales rep for a Swiss firm whose 1778 voyage, on horseback and on foot, around France to visit bookstores and renew accounts forms the spine of this story, Darnton reveals not only how the industry worked and which titles were in greatest demand, but the human scale of its operations. A Literary Tour de France is literally that. Darnton captures the hustle, picaresque comedy, and occasional risk of Favarger's travels in the service of books, and in the process offers an engaging, immersive, and unforgettable narrative of book culture at a critical moment in France's history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190678005
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritu of Harvard University, and is the author of The Great Cat Massacre and others. His website offers a digital tour of the research that went into the making of this book.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Before Balzac 1. Our man on Mission 2. The View from the Home Office 3. Smuggling: Pontarlier 4. Sizing up Shops: Lons-le-Saunier 5. Selling Books, Collecting Bills: Bourg-en-Bresse 6. Entrepreneurs and Buccaneers: Lyon 7. Domestic Contraband: Lyon 8. The Trade in Trading: Avignon 9. The Struggle for Survival in the South: Nîmes, Montpellier, Marseille 10. Hard Scrabble in the Southwest: Pézénas to Poitiers 11. Peddling and the Capillary System: Loudun 12. Upmarket and Downmarket in France's Homeland: Saumur to Dijon 13. An Ultimate Example: Besançon 14. The End of the Line: An Overview of the Demand for Literature 15. Lived Literature Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Although Literary Tour is not intended as such a comprehensive overview as Forbidden Best-Sellers, Darnton nevertheless here makes good on his long-standing promise to publish an overview of the commerce in books across the kingdom. Literary Tour should thus be welcomed as a highly readable, narratively structured, nationally scoped, and deeply researched history of book distribution in France before the Revolution." — Gregory Brown, Journal of Modern History

"A Literary Tour de France is a fascinating book, packed with information, and like a good historian Robert Darnton knows how to tell a story" — Jim Burns, The Penniless Press

"a delight to read, quirky in its observations and pointed in relating them to the wider picture." — David Coward, Times Literary Supplement

"This book and especially its accompanying website bring to life some of the important intermediaries in the pre-revolutionary book trade." — Christine Haynes, H-France Review

"[A] rich and textured account of how and what many French people were able to read in the decades before the upheaval of 1789."—Roxanne Ranchasi, New Books Network

"Thoughtful and well-researched..."—Kirkus Reviews

"Deftly written, this thoughtful and well-researched work will appeal to a wide variety of readers; scholars and casual fans of printing history will enjoy this insider's look that is both informative and entertaining."—Ali Houissa, Library Journal

From the Publisher

★ 02/15/2018
Over the course of many years preceding the French Revolution, French authorities had set up a system of cultural control and censorship by establishing boundaries of legally acceptable forms of publication and a government-mandated licensing system, which regulated the book industry. Although the French attempted to close their borders to both piracy and all forms of illegal trade, book smuggling from neighboring countries was rampant and the public in turn filled its shelves with books produced outside of France. Based on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Darnton's (Carl H. Pforzheimer Univ. Professor, Emeritus; Harvard Univ.; The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History) work explores underground networks of the book trade in France and surrounding countries. Specifically, how titles were produced, distributed, and sold; which authors were popular; and the changing patterns of demand and reading tastes across Europe over time. In the process, readers also learn about different writers, publishers, printers, type founders, smugglers, warehousemen, traveling salesmen, literary agents, reviewers, and booksellers in prerevolutionary France. VERDICT Deftly written, this thoughtful and well-researched work will appeal to a wide variety of readers; scholars and casual fans of printing history will enjoy this insider's look that is both informative and entertaining.—Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal

2017-10-11
A journey into the peculiar, nearly lawless world of bookselling in France circa 1778.Darnton, a longtime scholar of French culture and trenchant commentator on books and publishing (Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature, 2014, etc.), has spent decades poring through the files of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel, a Swiss publishing house. Little distinguished STN from its competitors just before the French Revolution, which serves the author's purposes well: his goal is to explore how books were generally distributed and sold and which books were most commonly consumed (mostly Enlightenment writers like Rousseau, religious works, pornography, and scurrilous titles about royalty and religions). The available evidence is mainly in ledgers and stiff business correspondence, but Darnton finds an arc by following Jean-François Favarger, an STN sales representative who, in 1778, circled the country visiting booksellers. Boots on the ground were essential because the book trade of the time was almost unmanageably chaotic. Publishers freely pirated each other's works (part of Favarger's job was to suss out what was worth pirating); books were shipped unbound, prone to the ravages of weather and transit; border smuggling was rampant to avoid the monarchy's control of the trade; and booksellers could often be lax about payment. (While on the road, Favarger maintained rankings of booksellers' reliability.) "We don't know of any branch of commerce that is more disagreeable or unrewarding than the book trade," one bookseller grumbled. Darnton's enthusiasm for his subject is palpable, and he delivers bucolic descriptions (with contemporary illustrations) of Favarger's stops in places like Lyon, Bordeaux, and Dijon. But at heart this is an academic, largely dry business history. Favarger is an intrepid salesman, but his greatest drama involves replacing a horse.Thoughtful and well-researched, but nonscholars would be satisfied with an essay-length treatment of this esoteric moment in publishing history.

Kirkus Reviews