This is a rich and path-breaking comparative study of reading tastes in the final years of old regime Europe. Based on extensive research in the account books of the Swiss publishers, the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), and related archives, it charts the dissemination of literature and reading tastes across Europe in the years leading up to the French revolution. In the process, it recasts our understanding of late 18th-century print culture and the contours of the enlightenment. The fruit of a widely acclaimed five year database project, the STN database, it is also a story of pioneering efforts to apply the latest digital technology and GIS mapping techniques to traditional historical and bibliographic problems.
Although written to serve as a standalone study, this book is ideally complemented by its companion volume, Mark Curran's The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment, which offers a radical reinterpretation of the structure and practices of the European book trade.
The STN database is now recognised as a cutting-edge digital project of global significance. Robert Darnton has called it "a prodigious accomplishment and a joy to use" while Jeremy Popkin adds, "No one working in the field of French Enlightenment studies … can afford to ignore the rich mine of data that Simon Burrows and his collaborators have made accessible, in an eminently usable form, and the new possibilities it opens up for scholars." The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I and II offer a roadmap of that data and what it can show us.

- 272 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Dedication
- Title
- Contents
- Illustrations, Maps, Charts and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Prologue: At the Shield of Minerva
- 1 The Elusive Enlightenment
- 2 The Book in Print Culture
- 3 Searching for Enlightenment in a Swiss Print Shop
- 4 The Intellectual Geography of the STN
- 5 Forgotten Bestsellers
- 6 Troubling Taxonomies
- 7 Harvesting the Literary Field
- 8 Of Cosmopolitan Reading and Novel Concerns
- 9 The Anatomy of the Illegal Sector
- 10 Philosophie, Science, Faith
- 11 From Swiss Politics to Revolutionary History
- Conclusion
- Afterword: The Future of FBTEE—Towards a Digital History of the Book
- List of Online Appendices
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Subject Index
- Title Index
- Copyright
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Yes, you can access The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe II by Simon Burrows in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Early Modern History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.