Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe

French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary Markets

Jeffrey Freedman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812243895, 9780812243895
• eBook ISBN: 9780812206449
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Though the field of book history has long been divided into discrete national histories, books have seldom been as respectful of national borders as the historians who study them—least of all in the age of Enlightenment when French books reached readers throughout Europe. In this erudite and engagingly written study, Jeffrey Freedman examines one of the most important axes of the transnational book trade in Enlightenment Europe: the circulation of French books between France and the German-speaking lands. Focusing on the critical role of book dealers as cultural intermediaries, he follows French books through each stage of their journey—from the French-language printing shops where they were produced, to the wholesale book fairs in Leipzig, to retail book shops at locations scattered widely throughout Germany. At some of those locations, authorities reacted with alarm to the spread of French books, burning works of the radical French Enlightenment and punishing the booksellers who sold them. But officials had little power to curtail their circulation: the political fragmentation of the German lands made it virtually impossible to police the book trade. Largely unimpeded by censorship, French books circulated more freely in Germany than in the absolutist monarchy of France.In comparison, the flow of German books into the French market was negligible—an asymmetry that corresponded to the hierarchy of languages in Enlightenment Europe. But publishers in Switzerland produced French translations of German books. By means of title changes, creative editing, and mendacious advertising, the Swiss publishers adapted works of the German Enlightenment for an audience of French-readers that stretched from Dublin to Moscow.An innovative contribution to both the history of the book and the transnational study of the Enlightenment, Freedman's work tells a story of crucial importance to understanding the circulation of texts in an age in which the concept of World Literature had not yet been invented, but the phenomenon already existed.

CHAPTER 1

Rite of Spring

The Leipzig Easter Fair and the Literary Marketplace

Le commerce de l’Allemagne ne peut se faire autrement que par les foires.

(Trade in Germany cannot be conducted otherwise than through the fairs.)

—Société Typographique de Berne to STN,
7 June 1780

In early March 1770, as the STN’s presses were turning out the first of its publications, a puzzling letter arrived at the shop in Neuchâtel. It came from a correspondent in German-speaking Switzerland, a firm called the Société Typographique de Berne, that had ordered a considerable quantity of the STN’s books for sale at the Easter book fairs in Germany. The STN had already dispatched some of those books to Bern but not all; and in their letter of early March, the booksellers in Bern announced that after the middle of the month, it would be too late to transport any more of the STN’s books to the fairs.¹

Why too late? the STN wondered. Without any previous knowledge of the book trade in Germany, the STN was under the impression that its correspondents in Bern intended its books for the fairs at both Frankfurt and Leipzig. The fairs would not start till sometime in the following month, and the STN had observed that textile merchants in Neuchâtel continued to make shipments of printed calicoes to Frankfurt as late as early April. If textiles could still be sent to Frankfurt at that late date, then why not books? the STN asked its correspondents in Bern.² And without waiting for a reply, it proceeded to send a crate of books to Bern on 1 April, followed a week later by a letter in which it expressed the hope that the books had arrived “in time to be sent to Frankfurt before the fair.”³ In fact, the STN’s correspondents in Bern had never expected to sell more than a handful of its books at the fair in Frankfurt: “You are perhaps unaware, Messieurs, that the fair in Frankfurt is of little significance for the book trade—in any case, for us,” C. A. Serini, an employee of the Société Typographique de Berne, explained to the STN in a letter of 11 April:

The few booksellers from the surrounding Catholic areas who go there are certainly not worth the trouble of undertaking a journey of 80 leagues. . . . Leipzig, where there is an assembly of five- to six-hundred booksellers from all countries, is the only location suitable for the book trade. . . . Let us suppose, Messieurs, that your crate arrives here on the 14th of this month. . . . They [the books in the crate] could not be in Frankfurt any earlier than 9 or 10 May, from there to Leipzig it will take at least thirteen to fourteen days; thus the crate would arrive after my departure, for I plan to depart from Leipzig on 21 or 22 May.⁴

The letter read as if written by a schoolmaster for his pupils. And, in a sense, the directors of the STN were pupils, neophyte book dealers who had a great to deal to learn about the business of selling books in Germany. Many years would go by before all the mysteries of that business were finally revealed to them. But the spring of 1770 was a decisive moment in their early education. Succinctly and plainly written, Serini’s letter made it clear to the Neuchâtelois that their mental map of the German book trade had been all wrong and that they would have to re-imagine it, Copernicus-like, from an utterly new perspective. The German book trade revolved around Leipzig: that was the main lesson Serini’s letter imparted, and it was a crucial lesson for any foreign publishing firm hoping to sell its books in the German literary market during the last third of the eighteenth century.

Unlike most markets today in the age of global capitalism, the German literary market of the late eighteenth century had not yet broken free of its moorings in time and space. Tightly bound, both temporally and spatially, to the Leipzig Easter fairs, it was still, quite literally, a market place.

For roughly two or three weeks every spring, Leipzig was transformed into a vast book emporium.⁵ Nearly all the major booksellers in Germany transported their new publications to the fairs, and hundreds of them attended the fairs in person, selling their own editions and buying those of others. While the fair lasted, the streets of Saxony’s commercial capital were a whirlwind of activity: book dealers dashed to and fro, account books tucked under their arms, inspecting one another’s stock, doing deals, and settling accounts. Then, once the fair had ended, they packed up what they had purchased and transported it to their shops throughout German-speaking Europe, from Frankfurt to Riga. Some of them might return to Leipzig for the autumn fair, but the volume of trade conducted at the autumn fair was small—too small to justify a second annual trip to Leipzig in the view of the Société Typographique de Berne.⁶ If a publisher wanted to ensure that his new publications would be able to reach readers all across German-speaking Europe, there was only one reliable method—to transport those publications to Leipzig for sale at the Easter fairs.

In no other European country of the late eighteenth century was the book trade so highly centralized as it was in Germany. Not even in France, the country of centralization par excellence, was there a single location where booksellers from every corner of the realm gathered annually. To be sure, all the major French publishers were located in Paris, and so they did not have to go anywhere else to trade with one another directly. But there were also hundreds of French booksellers scattered throughout the provinces. If the STN wished to enter into direct contact with them, it had no choice but to engage the services of a “traveling commissioner” (commis voyageur). Setting out from Neuchâtel, the traveling commissioner would journey around the kingdom on horseback for months at a time, passing from one province to another as he met with booksellers individually.⁷ In Germany, no such lengthy and arduous journey was necessary or even useful. On one occasion, in early 1776, Barthélemy de Félice, a French-language publisher in the Swiss town of Yverdon, offered to hire Serini as a traveling commissioner for Germany; Serini felt duty bound to turn down that offer: “As I know this country and the principal booksellers,” he explained in a letter to the STN, “I made him [i.e., Félice] realize the senselessness of such a journey, for one can accomplish everything and make all the necessary arrangements during the Leipzig fair.”⁸

Since the Leipzig fair had no parallel anywhere else in Europe, it is not surprising that its significance had to be explained to a French-language publisher in Yverdon. The Leipzig fair was like Gothic type or convoluted syntax, a German peculiarity whose meaning foreigners had a hard time deciphering. From the standpoint of German booksellers, however, the fair made perfectly good sense because it provided an institutional corrective to a characteristically German deficiency: the lack of a cultural capital. With the possible exception of Vienna, there was no city in the German-speaking world with enough booksellers and enough book buyers to absorb the entire pressrun of a new edition. Had it not been for the fairs, the marketing of a new publication would have entailed hundreds of small shipments to widely scattered booksellers. Instead, publishers were able to make bulk shipments to a single location—a method of trade that was both easier and cheaper than making hundreds of small shipments.

Easier, cheaper—and yet a hardship all the same. According to Friedrich Nicolai, a leading publisher in Berlin, the fairs were a “necessary evil”: necessary because they provided the only practicable remedy for the cultural, political, and economic fragmentation of Germany; an evil because the annual trek to Leipzig was expensive and time-consuming.⁹ Nicolai knew what he was talking about. During the course of his long career in the book trade, he made roughly forty trips to Leipzig. And his trips there were relatively short. If traveling to the fairs was a hardship for Nicolai in Berlin, how much more of a hardship must it have been for booksellers from western Germany, let alone for the French-language publishers of the Low Countries, France, and Switzerland.

Fortunately for publishers in western Europe, there was a way to sell books in Leipzig without going there in person: the so-called commission trade (Kommissionsbuchhandel). Publishers who wished to avoid the hardship of traveling to the fairs would send their publications to commissioners, and the latter would take charge of everything else: the storage of books in a Leipzig warehouse, the announcing of titles in the fair catalogues, and the negotiating of sales with other booksellers during the fairs. In the 1770s, French-language publishers in Amsterdam, Liège, Bouillon, and Paris were availing themselves of the Kommissionsbuchhandel, as were German publishers in southern and western Germany. And the arrangement worked splendidly. Indeed, it worked so well that it eventually spread beyond the circle of booksellers whose geographic distance from Leipzig precluded personal attendance at the fairs. By the turn of the century, nearly all the major publishing firms in German-speaking Europe were employing the services of commissioners in Leipzig.¹⁰

The Kommissionsbuchhandel was a commercial innovation of far-reaching significance. Originally designed in the eighteenth century to facilitate trade at the fairs, it gradually developed into a permanent, year-round institution. By the early nineteenth century, commissioners in Leipzig were receiving new publications and releasing them to other booksellers throughout the year. Fewer and fewer books therefore changed hands at the fairs, until, finally, the historical link between the German literary market and the fairs was severed altogether. Looking back from the perspective of the nineteenth century, it seems clear that the Kommissionsbuchhandel was the way of the future.

The STN’s directors, however, did not have the benefit of hindsight. In fact, they had no idea what the Kommissionsbuchhandel was. German booksellers tried to explain it to them, but the explanations did no good since they were couched in an ambiguous commercial jargon whose meaning was intelligible only to those who already understood how the German book trade operated.

The ambiguity stemmed from the specious resemblance between the German and French expressions “in Kommission” and “en commission.” If a German commissioner, call him “Herr X,” were selling books on behalf of another publisher at the Leipzig fairs, the standard way of describing that relation in German was to say that the books were being sold “bei Herrn X in Kommission.” Translated into French, that became “en commission chez Monsieur X.”¹¹ It is hard to imagine how else one could have translated the German. Unfortunately, however, “en commission” had another, far more common meaning, one with which the STN’s directors were indeed familiar and that caused them no end of confusion in their dealings with would-be commissioners in Germany. Usually, when a publisher consented to release his books to a bookseller “en commission,” it meant simply that the bookseller was obligated to pay only for such books as he managed to sell and that he was at liberty to return unsold copies after a specified lapse of time. Gradually, as the functional distinction between publisher and bookseller crystallized during the course of the nineteenth century, the sending of books “en commission” became an increasingly common practice. But it was not common in the late eighteenth century, and the STN disliked it—quite naturally since no publisher from Gutenberg to the present has ever relished the prospect of being saddled with returns. If the STN consented to release books “en commission,” it was only because it considered those books so old or otherwise undesirable as to be unsaleable by any other means. New publications that had just come off the presses it expected booksellers to purchase for their own accounts, without any provision for the return of unsold copies.

The two terms, in short, had utterly different meanings: to send books “en commission” to individual retail booksellers was an option of last resort; to send them to a German commissioner was a tried-and-true method for marketing new publications to hundreds of booksellers simultaneously.¹² The STN, however, mistook the latter for the former, and responded accordingly when German booksellers volunteered to serve as its commissioners at the fairs.

During the early 1770s, the STN received overtures from two well-established Frankfurt book dealers who offered to represent the STN as commissioners in Germany: Friederich Varrentrap and Johann Georg Esslinger. It is true that neither Varrentrap nor Esslinger would have made ideal commissioners, in part because both of them had their main shops in Frankfurt rather than Leipzig, but also because they were old. As doyens of the Frankfurt book trade, they had built their businesses in the days before the final decline of the Frankfurt fairs, and they seem to have had some difficult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Terminology and Sources
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Rite of Spring: The Leipzig Easter Fair and the Literary Marketplace
• Chapter 2. Whom to Trust? Insolvent Booksellers and the Problem of Credit
• Chapter 3. French Booksellers in the Reich
• Chapter 4. Demand
• Chapter 5. The Word of God in the Age of the Encyclopédie
• Chapter 6. Against the Current: Translating the Aufklärung
• Chapter 7. From Europe Française to Europe Révolutionnaire: The Career of Jean-Guillaume Virchaux
• Conclusion. What Were French Books Good For?
• Appendix A. STN Trade with Booksellers in Germany, 1770–1785
• Appendix B. The Folio Bible of 1773: Diffusion
• Appendix C. The Folio Bible of 1779: Prepublication Subscriptions
• Appendix D. The Bible in Germany: The Neuchâtel Folio of 1779 and the Bienne Octavo
• Appendix E. Diffusion of Sebaldus Nothanker in French Translation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments