The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450-1850: Connections and Comparisons

Joseph P. McDermott (ed.), Peter Burke (ed.)

https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888208081.001.0001
Published: 2015 Online ISBN: 9789888313617 Print ISBN: 9789888208081

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

CHAPTER

4 Distribution: The Transmission of Books in Europe and Its Colonies:

Contours, Cautions, and Global Comparisons 
James Raven

https://doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888208081.003.0004 Pages 147–180

Published: October 2015

Abstract
James Raven’s essay is concerned with the transmission of books in Europe and its colonies in the period between Gutenberg’s
invention of the hand press and the nineteenth century introduction of the steam press. Besides telling a story of market
expansion for publishing, he examines the geographical and social range of distribution and considers whether publications
circulated within a ‘closed’ or an ‘open’ circuit and whether the sellers remained at home or travelled with the books.

Keywords: Europe, Asia, Eurasia, Book history, Book culture, Book Printing, Technology, Publishing,
Book distribution, Book consumption
Subject: Asian History

The establishment of the printing press in some fourteen European cities by 1470, and in 110 by 1480, required the transformation of
book distribution systems to handle printed editions. The question of transmission, of distribution possibilities, and limitations, is a
crucial aspect of the history of European printing, publishing, and communication, and it is one where comparison with practices in
East Asia offers valuable insight.

The distribution of books, a crucial agency of cultural transaction, both created and breached frontiers for the written and printed
word, vernacular or otherwise. Across Europe, the distribution of texts enabled both revolution (intellectual and economic as well as
political and religious) and the creation of new systems and locales of shared knowledge. As also shown in this volume in Cynthia
Brokaw’s study of China, book distribution challenged privilege and cultural entrenchment yet also created bounded routes and
readerships. Differences in what was meant by “commercial” and “private” are critical to comparative global histories of the book.
Such differences also essentially affect the modes, extent, and effectiveness of distribution. As a comparison of the introduction of
printing in East Asia and Europe shows, the push of the market is not the only means to publish and transfer knowledge. Rather, the
market is often geographically, economically, and socially specific.

In Europe, the extremes of distance that publications, new and secondhand, traveled are perhaps not a surprise, given that by the
fifteenth century, manuscript circulation was extraordinarily far-flung. For at least two centuries, cargoes of written books had
traveled by land and water as part of increasingly sophisticated international trading networks, focused on urban, religious, and
1
university centers. What instead astonishes is the rapid advance of the social as well as geographical penetration of print, enabled
by the development of new production, trading and transport methods, and initiatives. Soon after the introduction of printing with
p. 148 moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century, European merchants, stationers, and publishers exploited inland transport and coastal
and marine shipping to expand their business in printed products. Thereafter, the extent of printed book advertisement and catalog
circulation increased with the transported volume of expensive as well as cheaper printed matter. Nearly four centuries after
Gutenberg, distributive changes in the 1840s marked a transition from one age of bookselling to the next. The transformation to the
book trade brought by steam-driven ships and trains was even more apparent than the much-vaunted divide of the end of the
Napoleonic wars in 1814 and the advent of the steam-driven printing press and papermaking machines.
 “Distribution” and “transport” have featured prominently in models offered of communications circuitry, from the pioneering “media
studies” questions of Harold Lasswell to the much-replicated diagrammatic pathways of Robert Darnton (with modifications by
Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker). “Who?”, “what?”, and “in which channel?” were the first three questions of Lasswell’s
challenge to understand the impact of manuscript and printed publication. They appeared before his more taxing questions of “to
whom?” and “with what effect?” Nevertheless, the “channel,” the methods of distribution, invites further investigation. Comparisons
with other parts of the world offer a certain reevaluation and finessing of the history of European book transportation, distribution,
and the means by which readers and clients received texts. Distribution was as important for noncommercial as commercial
publications but involved different originating motivations and effects. Chinese commercial printing developed within centuries of
2
the first widely accepted instance of printing in China in the early eighth century, and just as in Europe, noncommercial, private

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

publication in East Asia tended to privilege questions of impact, of how an audience might react to a text, with distribution often as
assured as the identity of the recipients; by comparison, in commercial printing and publishing, distribution might determine the
economic survival of the originator producer in a more uncertain marketplace. Dissemination is crucial in both scenarios, but
economic imperatives are variable. As Ian Maclean has observed of the early modern European book trade, “profit in this world did
3
not necessarily mean surplus profit or mercantile expansion.” This refines twenty-first-century models that privilege business
strategies and supply-side economics over other early modern concerns. It notably downplays a concern for scholarly and intellectual
goals that courted and depended upon enduring forms of patronage, subsidy, and forms of business enterprise that were restricted by
social, political, and ideological objectives.

p. 149
Conceptual Issues

Four abstract questions are helpful:

First is the matter of whether publications were circulated within a closed or an open circuit and how that relates to the type of
product. What did publication mean in making a text “public”? That degree of publicness rested on the nature of the market or
patronage. Both might also be part of the giving, commissioning, or selling of other products alongside books. Books themselves
were physically highly various, from the huge lectionary (or Bible used for public and communal reading out loud) and the luxury
finely illuminated manuscript or finely printed book to the humbler small ballad or chapbook of few pages, small size, and often
poor typography. In research terms, modern European social histories of the book offer a fascinating counterpoint to what Cynthia
Brokaw identifies as the relative neglect of “popular” book culture by Chinese historians, bibliographers, and bibliophiles. By
comparison, works of sophisticated scholarship and beautifully produced works circulating among a restricted elite (objects
4
cherished by Chinese book historians) are often marginalized in European histories.

Second is the question of the agency used for book distribution. There is a distinction here between itinerant, peripatetic, agents
(such as colporteurs, chapmen, or traveling merchants) and traveling books, moved by clients or purchasers or borrowers from a
fixed site (from which books might still travel far, and certainly across borders and seas). In the case of commercial circuits, agencies
included advertising and sales innovations such as auctions and auctioneers, quite beside peddlers, booksellers, and librarians.
Commercial distribution also encompasses the financial arrangements of sale or loan, of credit agreements and credit lines, and of
discounts offered by wholesalers to retailers or other onward selling agents.

Third is the question of geographical and social range, of the expansion and the limitation to the distances that books traveled and to
their penetration of different social groups. Geographical range varies according to the possibility of satisfying any given demand (or
perhaps creating one) by surmounting physical barriers and obstacles to book distribution. In the social range of that demand, gender
and age differences are particularly significant. The fuller profile of distribution engages with questions of literacies, readership
practices, and the aural as well as reading audience for books and print.

Fourth is the question of the timing of changes in distribution practices as related to issues of production. Distribution can never
operate in complete isolation from changes to manufacturing processes, product development, or transport innovation. Resurgent
p. 150 interest in historical bibliography has inspired dozens of new studies of the transmission of texts in Europe since the late fifteenth
century, in which the circulation of the written and printed word, vernacular or otherwise, invited instruction and entertainment,
confrontation and consensus. Broad questions of the sociology of textual production, circulation, and reception, assisted by new
digital resources, have encouraged reevaluation of an early modern republic of letters and a European and transatlantic realm of
popular and scientific literature stretching from Lisbon to St. Petersburg, and from California to Constantinople.
 Cautions for Comparisons

In Europe, printed texts, in all their variety, accompanied and interacted with continuing scribal publication and correspondence after
1450. Print, a new product, but one that also often required the incorporation of writing (notably on printed forms and certificates)
inspired new modes of social engagement and a revolution in the construction and dissemination of knowledge. Key words are
“circulation” and “dissemination” but also “publication,” which for all its financial denotation is also about making books public.
The changing mechanics of textual transmission have to be explained in relation to changing demand, financial acumen, and
technological and transport innovation. It is exactly here that comparative perspectives highlight three important explanatory

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

cautions.

First, to extend the comparison between different economic modes of book production and dissemination, any survey of “commerce
in print” must recognize that even in Europe, where noncommercial printing as described by Joseph McDermott was far less
common than in China and Japan, large collections accounted for a sizeable proportion of the overall book market. Books sometimes
traveled as gifts, as the pawns of religious contest, and as trophies of war. Royal deaths brought the dispersal of great libraries like
the Corvina of Matthias of Hungary and the great collection of Zygmunt August of Poland. The Reconquista, the advance of the
Ottomans, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the revolutions of the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries caused
widespread upheaval in the book market. Private, institutional, and monastic libraries, from Tunis to Pozsony (then Pressburg, now
Bratislava), were pillaged or broken up and sold. The bibliographical price Sweden paid for the abdication of Queen Christina in
1654 was her eventual transference of thousands of manuscripts and books to the Vatican library. Much other looting during the
Thirty Years’ War rejuvenated the exchange of ancient books and manuscripts. Sakularisation under Joseph II and Napoleon forced
monasteries to disgorge their holdings and sent crates of books across the mountains of Western Europe and down the Danube and
the Rhine (and there are many more examples). This does not, of course, diminish the impact of war or religious struggle on the sale
p. 151 of books. Few gluts or dearths after conflict or pillage have been without their commercial beneficiaries, and booksellers (and
5
book buyers) are certainly not excepted.

The second caution is that European and Western bibliographical studies and book history have been framed and divided up by
nation-states. In many ways, as David McKitterick in his contribution here reminds us, the nation-state is a misleading geographical
unit for such research. The political (not always linguistic) unit is the obvious enabler for retrospective national bibliographies
(which some countries have yet to complete), but books circulating within that unit were and are international commodities. The
Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), for example is the online Dutch retrospective bibliography for 1540–1800 (currently
130,000 titles). It is designed to contain bibliographical descriptions of all surviving books published in the Netherlands and of those
in Dutch published abroad between those dates. The companion Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen (STCV) describes surviving
Dutch-language materials printed between 1601 and 1700 within the present-day boundaries of Flanders (including Brussels) and, in
its second working phase, works printed in other languages than Dutch (notably Latin, Spanish, and French). French and German
6
STCs are ongoing but so far limited by chronological range, and nothing as accessible or comprehensive yet exists for those
7
attempting to identify the scribbled titles of books and pamphlets originating from Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian territories. More
suggestive national (and linguistic and British colonial) counts of titles published between 1550 and 1800 can be constructed by use
of the online English Short-Title Catalogue, while the Universal Short-Title Catalogue Project at the University of St. Andrews
p. 152 comprises 52,000 pre-1601 entries in and is the boldest attempt so far to escape the boundaries imposed by nationally based
8
STCs. Yet any national history of the book is really a history of book exchange in and out, complicated by nightmarish
identification problems. For example, the imprints of many editions declared that they were printed in the Netherlands when they
were not, and many that were printed in the Netherlands stated that they were printed in France, or Germany, or elsewhere. Among
many research projects engaged in transnational book circulation are those tracing the Russian and Eastern destination of books from
9
the Netherlands, Amsterdam and the Hague, and the German links forged with St. Petersburg and the Baltic towns.

A third interpretational difficulty concerns small printing jobs, such as the printing of pieces requiring only a sheet, including most
chapbooks, and fractional parts of a sheet, including most “job-work” of forms and other non-book printing. Job-work was the
financial mainstay of the vast majority of printers. Ranging from sales and auction posters to business and social stationery, job
printing was extremely important in the development of trade and finance. Commerce rather than religion often provided the drive to
numeracy and alphabetization in Europe. The social impact of jobbing printing, however, remains neglected by book historians,
10
while the history of numeracy is particularly underdeveloped. Although non-survival of this material is not apparently as acute as
in China, where pre-1500 imprints are especially rare, staggering statistics have been provided revealing past undertakings by major
11
European printers for forms and certificates in batches of 10,000 or more but for which not a single copy now survives. The
counterparts in East Asia, to mention but a few examples, include government tax and registration forms, ritual and religious prayers
p. 153 and offering statements, paper money for ancestral worship, embossed impressions for private and government use, standardized
12
contract forms, advertisements, and divination slips.
 Although there are parallels with East Asia, the blind spots in European book history are often either less applicable or concern
questions so central to the distribution of books in Japan and China that they could never have been ignored. In this sense,
comparative book history between East and West is not only timely but would have saved many earlier scholars from hasty
assumptions. As other chapters in this volume describe, in many periods the sale of books in China and Japan paled in comparison to
the nonmarket circulation of texts financed by government, temple, shrine, and family or private patronage. Distribution networks
were necessarily prescribed and self-fulfilling. Caution regarding retrospective national bibliography is less applicable in Asia where
equivalent projects are either less developed or differently conceived (e.g., the Japanese import of large amounts of Chinese imprints
in the Tokugawa period [1600–1868]). Distribution across borders is nonetheless a critical issue and a key explanatory force in
linguistic and orthographic adoption and change. Given the different business (and indeed often “noncommercial”) models of some

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

non-Western printing and book production operations, the importance of “small jobs” also takes a different focus. But it is important
to identify, as Cynthia Brokaw does in her contribution, the different distributional circuits that developed from very different textual
products. Beyond the West it is also helpful to avoid both overconcentration on canon and genre and conservatism in thinking about
what constitutes the material “book.” In many different parts of the world, for example, financial publications and newsbook printing
might be regarded as intermediate to jobbing and book production, and a further crucial component in the changing history of textual
transmission. Nonetheless, the focus for a history of the international circulation of print in Europe and the West remains with
commercial book distribution. The mechanics of book supply had been very much the product of the medieval university and in
certain cities of Europe, where there was both a central administration and a major university. The commercial development of the
distribution of the printed book relied heavily upon existing business structures of the stationers and their guild or privilege.

Of itself, demand had not necessitated the invention of printing in Europe, but once printing was available and new markets
identified, demand grew well beyond existing clients and customers, who were so heavily concentrated in learned circles in
universities, religious houses, and legal institutions. The very rapid success of Gutenberg’s printing of the Bible confirmed his
speculative instincts. In the mid-1470s, the Florentine book merchant Gerolamo Strozzi used agents in Rome, Siena, Pisa, and
p. 154 Naples to service his relatively trouble-free switch from manuscript to printed editions and to undertake orders of more than
1,500 volumes. From Mainz, Gutenberg’s backer, Peter Schőffer, ran a sales organization stretching to Switzerland, Paris, and
Scandinavia. During the next hundred years production and distribution soared. From Antwerp, Christophe Plantin sent 3,000 copies
of his 1566 Hebrew Bible to his agent on the Barbary Coast, and between 1571 and 1576 dispatched 52,000 service books from
13
Antwerp to Spain. Book merchants in Copenhagen managed a trade to the north with the products of Antwerp and Venice.

Many agents contributed to the extension of long-distance distribution and the creation of diverse print circuits. Most easily
distinguished are the organized distribution systems originating with central publishers and wholesalers (and thus, in at least some
respects, similar to the concentration of book production and distribution centers—and regions of uneven and limited distribution—
14
in the lower Yangzi delta in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China). Great cities boasting many printers and publishers by the
end of the sixteenth century developed as major distribution centers. Paris boasted an active if relatively localized circulation
network; more far-flung were the book routes emanating from Venice, Basel, Antwerp, and Lyon and other cities on major European
crossroads and ports. Paris before the Thirty Years’ War also differed from Venice and Antwerp in that its publishers hardly bothered
to send representatives to the Frankfurt Fair. By contrast, the Kobergers of Nuremberg kept stocks with distribution agents in Venice,
Danzig, Hamburg, Basel, Frankfurt-am-Main, Lübeck, Prague, Augsburg, Amsterdam, Vienna, Lyon, and a dozen more cities. As
Koberger had extolled in a printed advertisement that accompanied the more than 2,500 copies of his great Nuremberg Chronicle of
15
1493: “Speed now, Books, and make yourself known wherever the winds blow free.” In what might be described as the “Hansa
model” of marketing books, merchants traveled to fairs and other marts selling to other wholesale merchants, employing numerous
16
factors, licensed itinerant salespeople, and warehousing along leading and developing trade routes. Books, many exported as
sheets and packed in barrels, traveled in a network connected to the great freight routes. Contemporary illustrations of the packing of
p. 155 printed sheets and books in barrels are shown in Fig. 4.1. Key overland routes

p. 156
included the Amsterdam to Breslau route and the Iter Italicum, the two-way route from Poland to Rome followed by clergy,
17
diplomats, scholars, students, and books.
Fig. 4.1

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

“Der Buchhändler” by Jan Luyken in Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Abildung der gemein-nützlichen
Hauptstände, Regensburg, 1698.

A contrasting, but in some ways variant, “branch” system was exemplified by the Italian trade in books, for so long dominated by
Venice. Wholesalers relied on barter and books sold by unit price, the sales to retail booksellers based on discounts and
commissions. The opening of branch stores in major cities developed in order to minimize the financial risks to which the
wholesalers were exposed. In addition, much trade was also conducted through the established great fairs of Lyon (dating from 1420
but eclipsed by the mid-sixteenth century), Leipzig (established since at least 1165), Antwerp, and Frankfurt. Frankfurt, a free
Imperial city with its great trading embankments on the Main, was the focus of a twice-yearly international book fair (like Leipzig)
18
from at least 1485. The fair catalogs, dating from 1564, became international trading resources. Publishers’ lists were used by
booksellers to publicize their own printed or financed titles and those books bought or exchanged with other retailers or
19
wholesalers. Fig. 4.2 reproduces the title page from one of the annual Frankfurt catalogs, this one dated 1622.
 Fig. 4.2

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Catalogus universalis pro nundinis Francofurtensibus, 1622

(reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge).

Centralization was far greater in some states than in others. Paris dominated France, Lyon providing short-lived independence as an
early publishing and distributive center. Quite aside from the foremost European suppliers (Venice, Frankfurt, and Antwerp), the
states of Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy boasted a number of important, interconnected distributive centers, while England
and later Ireland (but not Scotland) bore more resemblance to the single metropolitan model of France. This model differed again
from that of early modern China, where the lower Yangzi delta cities were the central clearinghouse in the empire, collectively
producing by the Ming dynasty’s end more texts than any other publishing center and sending them off to Beijing and other far-flung
20
cities. In England, the economic publishing and distributive dominance of London ensured that rivals could not compete. Nothing
like the national dominance of London (or indeed Paris) existed in China and Japan until, with the development of mechanized
p. 157 printing, the unquestionable supremacy

p. 158
21
of, respectively, Shanghai and Tokyo. Edinburgh, Dublin (at least before 1800), and Glasgow developed important book export
businesses, but London remained the main publishing source for the books, magazines, and other print sent out to the British
provinces and then to the colonies in North America, the Caribbean, India, the United States, Africa, Australasia, and East Asia.
 Shipments

Seas and rivers remained dominant arteries for book distribution in East Asia and Europe, if only because transport by water was
22
much cheaper than by land until the arrival of the railway. Significant European routes included that used by the Kobergers
through Strasbourg and along the Rhine, but in Europe and Japan (more so than in China) there was also much important coastal
trade, including between Antwerp and Spain and North Africa, between Flanders and Brittany, between northern Italy and eastern
and southern Spain, between the Netherlands and Danzig (both crucial to the Hebrew book trade) and between Osaka and Tokyo.
Until the railways were built in the 1850s, Swedish book cargoes went almost entirely by coastal trading, and that restricted to the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

open-water season of the Baltic summer (in China north–south shipments went by the Grand Canal, at least when it was not frozen
23
over in the winter months).

Overseas distribution, like the transoceanic trade from Europe to the Americas and the Chinese export of considerable cargoes of
Chinese books to Tokugawa Japan, remains the outstanding challenge for study of the history of books from at least the eighteenth
century onwards. Comparative studies of the different locales, peoples, and initiatives linked by the Atlantic reveal the intimidating
scale of the enterprise. Despite Isabel Hofmeyr’s pioneering interpretation of a “Protestant Atlantic” in which “the space of empire”
24
is “intellectually integrated,” transatlantic comparative book history is at an early stage. Studies of French America such as those
p. 159 by Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal that incorporate sections on “échanges, transports et commerce,” are valuable yet relatively
25
lonely relations to equivalent histories for British North America and the British Caribbean. Histories of Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, German, Swedish, and other transatlantic book communities, with a few notable exceptions, are little known beyond their
26
country of publication. The most direct evidence of the shipments and of the origins of the books conveyed remains in booksellers’
and customers’ invoices, orders, and memoranda, ships’ dockets and customs records, sales advertisements and the correspondence,
diaries, and wills of book collectors. Together with the surviving imported and exported publications, these diverse sources can
contribute to a reassessment of transatlantic book, pamphlet, and newspaper destruction that clearly reveals, for example, the
27
dependence of North American communities on importation of European print well into the nineteenth century. Details of
distribution techniques also suggest the long-distance credit and financing obstacles that had to be overcome and the complex
arrangements for shipping and identifying new publications (as well as the availability of antiquarian books) from a distance.
Recovery of original demands offers striking insight into the practices associated with long-distance and time-consuming transport
of print and correspondence, such as the placement of periodicals and newspapers in the captain’s cabin to expedite dockside
28
unloading in the port of destination. The surviving accessions registers of numerous libraries attest also to the ordering, dispatch,
and accounting procedures involved in the shipping of books and then the onward inland travel required. Humphrey Chetham’s
Library in remote England, for example, largely acquired books through two London booksellers, Samuel Smith and Robert
Littlebury, a secondhand dealer and major importer from Continental Europe. Fig. 4.3 reproduces a page from Chetham’s Accession
Register 1655–1700, when consignments totaling some 3,000 books arrived in Manchester, most orders again packed for travel in
p. 160 barrels or in specially constructed boxes known as “fatts.”
 Fig. 4.3

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Accessions register and invoices book, Chethamʼs Library, Manchester, England, 1655–1700

(reproduced by kind permission of the Fellows and Librarian of Chethamʼs Library).

p. 161
Obstacles
Here, then, were “livres sans frontières,” and yet for four centuries after Gutenberg the rate and manner of selling books continued to
be curtailed by two different types of obstacle: by regulation imposed by church, state, and town government and guilds, and by the
constraints of transport infrastructures. Emphasis on book-trade development must be counterpointed with reminders about “1imits-
29
to-growth.” First, and most obviously, imposed regulation was introduced by ecclesiastical and national authorities and by trade
and guild regulation from within the industry. Censorship and policing, and to some extent guild authority, followed not an economic
but a political time frame, with varying effectiveness at different periods and locations. France, Spain, and the Italian states,
including Venice, variously adopted direct control over censorship and the policing of the press and were subject to the constant
attentions of the church. Contraband books and literary undergrounds have been the subject of many distinguished studies, and their
30
circuits have in fact been described much more fully than the broader effects of legal and religious constraints. There has, for
example, been relatively little interest in checks and obstacles in individual and institutional collection patterns.

Censorship in Europe, as it curtailed distribution and forced underground transmission, is dominated, in reputation at least by the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum (from 1559). The force of the Index is an unavoidable part of any study of bookselling in the Catholic
realms, and its influence contributed largely to the demise of the Frankfurt book fair. The Bücherkommissar (book commissioner)
sent by the emperor and the following Book Commission rejecting Protestant publications also undermined the Frankfurt fair. In the
sixteenth century, Frankfurt handled about twice the volume of books traded at Leipzig; by 1700, the figures were reversed.
Significantly, however, Leipzig was never to be as international in character as Frankfurt, its most successful years being during the
 31
p. 162 consolidation of the German book-trading regions. Protestant realms also developed censorship and often brutal curbs to
publication and the dissemination and transport of print—especially across borders. In England, the Low Countries, and northern
Europe, press regulation was largely—though never entirely—devolved to guilds or trade company monopolies, also regulating
employment conditions and entry to the trade. In this more corporatist model, different crafts adopted different regulative and trading
functions. The supremacy of the Stationers’ Company in England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be compared
with the mighty guild of Binders in northern Scandinavia, where bookselling was largely the sale of imported books, unbound. The
binding trade took responsibility for import and regulation of printing and publishing from 1620, during the high watermark of
Swedish international power, until the second half of the eighteenth century. Similar authority was exercised by the powerful binders
32
in Lithuania and the Ukraine, who also specialized in the crucial foreign book trade.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Another European but not East Asian limitation to distribution resulted from the obstruction to trade imposed by many early modern
town governments. The distinction between wholesale and retail was often reinforced by civic laws which forbade those who were
not freemen of a town from selling by retail. Strangers were usually able to wholesale goods to freemen, and certain merchants
enjoyed trading rights by tradition or grant at a national level. A marked unevenness in development overwhelmed many regions.
From the 1620s onwards, for example, there were various Dutch initiatives to open up the market for Jewish books in Eastern
Europe. The Jewish-Polish and Lithuanian market was completely dominated by Amsterdam until the late eighteenth century. The
33
first Hebrew-language press in western Ukraine was not established until 1697. The ascendancy of Amsterdam in the East could
be compared to the ascendancy of London in England, or the power of Antwerp in the Spanish northern lands to the power of French
importers in Italy and Spain in the late eighteenth century. For many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century merchants, native and alien,
the rounds of the fairs and markets held outside the jurisdictions of the towns were the only, if increasingly successful, sources of
business. In Central and Eastern Europe, such constraints endured with many changes and interruptions during an often volatile
34
political history for a further century or more. Tellingly, in premodern China and Japan, such constraints would have more often
p. 163 been the arrangements of book merchant groups rather than the laws of the central or local government.

The second general limits-to-growth point is constraint from within—from transport limitations, market bottlenecks, and structural
complications. While distribution enabled the development of printing in its first hundred years, it also remained the crucial check to
many setting up as printers and publishers. This is the precursor to Robert Darnton’s picture of eighteenth-century diffusion, where
the customs declarations, the bills of exchange, and other waves of paper surging across Europe threatened at times to overwhelm
35
the entrepreneurs, who tried to contain them in the channels of commerce. In the first age of print, it was the narrowness and
geographical range of the market which constrained the selling of books. Precisely because distribution was so difficult, expensive,
and risky, leading merchant stationers rather than printers gained effective control of publication within a century of the introduction
of printing. Moreover, the technological base of the hand-operated printing press was still in place by the early nineteenth century.
For those publishing, the technical printing processes had changed little. In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable market,
capital continued to be tied up over a long period. Distribution, the workings of supply, remained the crucial component in the
expansion of publishing. Only developments in the means to meet market demand allowed an increase in the number of firms
operating under continuing technological constraints, heavy capital requirements, and paper and labor overheads. Means of transport
was quite obviously a crucial variable. Carriage and accommodation costs were a crippling burden to the trade conducted at the
international fairs, and encouraged, despite the protectionism of certain states, the sale of unbound sheets to retailers, as well as far-
flung catalog circulation. Distribution problems not only gave the stationers and the major financiers their supremacy but also held
back development in certain other book trades. We can draw useful parallels with the advance of printing in eighteenth-century
Russia, where enthusiastic accounts of the volume of publication have recently been modified by emphasis on crude distribution
36
networks which limited the impact of print and the growth of the book trades.

p. 164 As a result of these impediments, transport costs were consistently high across early modern and eighteenth-century Europe, and the
transformation in the economics of distribution over this period very obviously eased textual production, just as the interference of
church, state, and guild restrictions impeded it. The development of discount systems depended upon distribution possibilities,
depending in turn upon advances in transportation. In setting prices, wholesale booksellers had to anticipate the markup at retail
necessary to allow retailers a worthwhile profit. The publishing booksellers paid carriage costs, and these contributed significantly to
production costings.

Publishers attended so closely to distribution because of the recurrent need in the commercial market to sell much of their output
quickly. Although publishers did not always aspire to sell the whole edition as they used their backlists (stored in depots at
international fairs) to fund purchases through the practice known as Tauschhandel, a large volume of unsold and expensive printed
materials represented a long-term and major capital tie-up. In many cases, it was often necessary to sell great quantities of books in
which so much was invested. When an especially urgent sale was required, discounting also proved critical. With many regional
variations, very significant markups passed as acceptable at different stages of onward selling. In other cases, however,
Tauschhandel (and its variants) ensured that business and credit were transacted by exchange of wares between booksellers. In
mainland Europe, the greatest of the international booksellers maintained permanent warehouses at the fair cities of Leipzig and
37
Frankfurt and swapped, page for page, printed materials of the same format with other publishing booksellers. Established trading
 circuits in southern Germany extended their reach, much in the same way as the printers and publishers of Venice, dominant in
Europe by 1500, developed far-reaching trading alliances and networks. As we know from his letters to Thomas Bodley, the London
bookseller John Bill not only issued his copies of Frankfurt catalogs but also traveled to the fair, then at the height of its fame as the
central book mart in Europe. There is every reason to think that similar exchange practices, if on a more modest scale, operated
between other leading booksellers.

p. 165
Distribution Networks

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Beyond the central source of distribution were the local feeder networks sending on centrally produced goods but also adding their
own locally printed, usually small-job publications. In addition, secondhand and antiquarian book distribution greatly increased in
volume and complexity. Peddlers, hawkers, colporteurs, and chapmen comprised a small army of low-cost traveling salespeople in
mainland Europe, selling everyday household goods like buttons, gloves, napkins, cloth, small books, and pamphlets (see Plate 4.1).
As systems of distribution steered trade development, the most far-reaching retail networks were those worked by ballad sellers,
38
country chapmen and minstrels, and the many colorful peddler-families in France and Italy described by Laurence Fontaine. Early
modern Europe shared with early modern China a dependence on family dynasties and kinship alliances for the distribution of
popular tracts through the generations and across the mountains and valleys. Many of their practices, and indeed circuits endured for
centuries, as demonstrated in studies such as those by Jean-François Botrel chronicling book peddling in nineteenth- and early
39
twentieth-century Spain. Fig. 4.4 features a nineteenth-century Spanish drawing of one of the hundreds of blind sellers (and
singers) of ballads and other cheap print familiar to both village and city life. In many respects, the rounds of nineteenth-century
40
chapmen and peddlers matched the activities of their forebears in the sixteenth century. Some circuits were intricate and regional
but others were spectacularly long-distance. One surviving account records eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian farm workers
in Friuli buying printed stock from the Remondini firm of Bassano in the winter months and then taking these cheap publications
41
into Eastern Europe, even as far as Kiev. Here is the equivalent of the connections throughout the Chinese empire along the Yangzi
valley and the Grand Canal—and yet also a difference in the social and economic underpinnings of long-distance book commerce.
The support of private collectors and the sustained demand and producer-client relationship entailed by book collecting represented a
p. 166 very different type of networking from that developed speculatively by traveling humble salespeople, humbly capitalized and
bearing other humble goods (also collected from central repositories). Neither extreme benefited from assured, closed clientage, yet
the market operated in very different ways according to type of commercial product and type of customer.
 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023
(reproduced by kind permission of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires, Paris).
Anonymous mid-seventeenth-century painting (École française)
Plate 4.1
 Fig. 4.4

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

A blind colporteur illustrated in Los Españoles pintados por si mismos (The Spaniards painted by themselves) (Madrid, Gaspar
y Roig, 1851).

p. 167 Histories of European peddlers and chapmen divide between those suggesting growing cultural convergence between the elite and
the people and those concluding that chapbooks contributed to increasing polarization between a high and a low culture in early
modern Europe. The peddler is generally seen as a representative of popular culture and as the main supplier of cheap print for the
lower classes in the period 1600–1850. In German, French, and English regions, this mode of print (and some manuscript)
conveyance has been studied in a predominantly rural context. There, the role of the peddler traveling from town to countryside was
indeed distinct from the role of the established booksellers in the towns, selling books to educated and propertied customers. As
Jeroen Salman and others have shown, in the highly urbanized Netherlands the itinerant functioned as a crucial extension of
42
established booksellers in the towns; the same observation holds true for certain Japanese and Chinese cities. The peddler
contributed to a finely tentacled distribution network that effectively reduced the gap between the established bookseller and the
more modest consumers instead of extending it. As a result, the “popular” is more definable as that provided by traveling chapmen
43
rather than created by localized writers and publishers. In a way that parallels the earlier relationship between print and manuscript
44
circulation in China, manuscript newsletter distribution further increased delivery contacts and connections.

The turning point in international trading in books came with the lessening of structural constraints on distribution from the late
seventeenth century, fundamental transport changes, and new financial organization interlinked with new social, urban, formations.
By the mid-eighteenth century almost every part of Europe was affected. Printing was introduced to Poland, in Cracow, as early as
1473 (by an itinerant Bavarian printer), and the presses printed some 7,000 editions in Cracow and many other towns of Poland-
45
Lithuania in the sixteenth century. Even though the Polish book industry was less developed compared to the printing houses and
publishing booksellers of Italy, the Netherlands, and France, Polish presses played a vital part in supplying print to Central and
p. 168 Eastern Europe. The earliest books in Cyrillic type were printed in Cracow and then in the Balkans before the seventeenth-century
 ascendancy of the Moscow Printing House, founded in about 1568 and then reopened and more effectively productive from
1614.

From the mid-sixteenth century, Poland further exemplified a production center that also constituted an important market for books.
Similar interplay developed in Hungary, Bohemia, and Moravia a little later (and where most early Hungarian books were printed in
Cracow and Vienna). The Polish market is graphically reflected in surviving inventories of booksellers and merchants (which
46
include, among many examples of imported texts, thousands of Protestant books printed in Polish in Königsberg). Polish
47
booksellers imported and distributed books that were produced in Europe’s leading printing domains. Demand that required
similar importation advanced in Scandinavia, where, for example, the Danish printer Henrik Waldkirch (active 1598–1629)

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

48
established important connections to the Frankfurt fair and to Basle. For all the attention to a golden age of English letters from
Shakespeare to Milton, the English model was not dissimilar to the Scandinavian, being far from self-sufficient in printed and
49
especially scholarly book production before the end of the seventeenth century. By 1750, much printing in Danish, German, and
other languages in Denmark and Sweden was supported by a flourishing market for books printed in Danish and other languages in
50
Hamburg, Paris, and London, a market that certainly encompassed many Norwegian towns.

As the market deepened, many distribution networks embraced the sale and cataloging of cheap print together with secondhand
books and pamphlets. During the first half of the eighteenth century the major book-trade centers, with their radial distribution
networks, were Amsterdam, Paris, the Hague, Leipzig, Hamburg, Geneva, Frankfurt, Utrecht, and Venice. During the second half of
the eighteenth century, the productivity of both London and Paris soared, and the two came to dominate Europe as centers of
publishing. In the eighteenth century also, the activity of groups with post office franking privileges greatly reduced the cost of
newspaper distribution.

Labor was rarely a problem. Most of the ballad chapbook- and godliness-sellers were youths—cheap and energetic laborers in a
sharply underemployed economy. The changing age structure of the population even helped shape distribution practices. During the
p. 169 sixteenth century, the embryonic postal services from Italy and Central Europe led, among others, by Milanese and Venetian
courier businesses, enabled wide dissemination of materials along main highways. In 1534, periodical post riders traveled between
Antwerp and Venice and three years later between Venice and Rome. The postal systems in Italy, Germany, France, England, and
Spain extended with the use of taverns and coaching inns as post houses and information offices, and, in some ways more
progressively, in the Holy Roman Empire use of the postal system involved the payment of a fee (the porto), rather than obtaining an
exclusive privilege. Increasingly across Europe by 1700, post offices served, at a relatively high price, increased public custom and
51
p. 170 the distribution needs of letter writers and newsprint producers. Fig. 4.5 reproduces a typical contemporary map of Central
European postal routes. Many booksellers adopted the public postal service to assist with newsprint distribution or sent stock to
provincial retailers and customers by common carriers (Plate 4.2). The provincial dispatch of printed instruction and entertainment
advanced erratically, however.
Fig. 4.5

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Postal routes from Augsburg, Strassburg, etc., from Johann Christoph Weigel the Elder (1654–1725), Nuremburg, early
eighteenth century

(reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg).

Plate 4.2

Colored engraving of clerks at work at the post o ice in London ca. 1808

(authorʼs collection).

In the early nineteenth century, steam-driven technologies required but also directly boosted new distribution methods and
capacities. Steam applied to the printing press from 1814 came a year after the launch of the first steamboat and only five years
before the first transatlantic crossing by steamship. Experiments with steam-driven land locomotives continued through the next
decade. In the enlargement of the readership for print, the advancing railway system proved critical. The railway book edition,
railway station bookstalls, and the railway circulating libraries effectively mapped the extension of the tracks. Although we can
speak of a national market for cheap print from an early date, with various means of transport employed (including some coastal
shipping), the railways transformed the market for mass-produced books, newspapers, and print. The inaugural railway lines
progressed steadily during the 1830s. The Liverpool–Manchester railway and the first section of the Saint-Étienne–Lyon railway
opened in 1830, and the first railway in Ireland in 1834, in Belgium in 1835, and in Bavaria, the first steam-powered German railway
line, in the same year. Railways first operated in Russia in 1837, in Hungary in 1846, and in Spain in 1848. Thereafter, the railway
 age boosted all levels of distribution, developing for books and journals what amounted to a new stage of opportunity in book and
print production, marketing, distribution, and reception.

Railways created new markets as well as supplying existing ones. In Britain, W. H. Smith’s bookstalls supplied long-distance
passengers and those traveling regularly to work. The firm helped to popularize reading in trains, where it was much easier than in
52
horse-drawn coaches. In France, Jean-Yves Mollier tells a very similar story in his history of Louis Hachette—fondateur d’un
53
empire. As publishers sold more books but received less per volume, market building was sustained by a transformation in
distribution systems and greater competitiveness in foreign markets. Supporting agencies notably included new commercial
54
libraries, but demand was also boosted by subscription book clubs, private and town debating and literary societies, workingmen’s

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

55
clubs (founded either by or for workingmen), and the solemn recommendations of the periodical reviews and magazines.

p. 171
Business and Financial Organization

The basic, long-term story of growth is, of course, indisputable. Paralleling the separation of crafts in other trades, book-trade
organization in most European towns by the end of the seventeenth century included the separation of wholesaling and retailing
businesses, the development of a tiered discount system, and protectionism at both state and trade association level. A large number
of surviving contemporary prints and paintings graphically illustrate the selling and the sending out of books in all their different
56
ways. By at least the mid-seventeenth century most traders found the provincial sale of books to be cheaper and more efficient by
wholesale trade of unbound materials to fixed-site retailers in country towns rather than by trade of bound books at the fairs. Few of
the country retailers were specialist dealers, and certainly not in books. Almost all were general shopkeepers (in China they were
often stationery stores and even the publisher’s shop). By the end of the seventeenth century shopkeepers in provincial towns were
conducting a considerable retail trade in books. The local bookbinder, finishing books to specific requirements, remained a staple of
town trade until the mid-nineteenth century. The peddlers’ methods of sale and basic circuits, from wholesale suppliers of map books
to far-flung individual customers, continued virtually unchanged through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wider distribution
of all other books, and the collection of libraries, was developed by new means to select and buy books. Most notable was the
57
distribution of catalogs, including those for auctions.

Capital requirements and the inflexibility brought about by technological and production constraints had continuing and particular
consequences for the book trades, heightening the importance of marketing and distribution. This was one of several reasons why the
fight to increase audiences and consumer interest was so important in the early modern period but even more so in late eighteenth-
century and early nineteenth-century book trades development, before technological revolution in printing (i.e., steam power) broke
through former constraints. Even under the new technical regime of production, however, transport development—namely, the
railways—proved critical across Europe. Although we can speak of an international market for print and of national markets for
cheap print from an early date, with various means of transport employed, most all radiating from the metropoles, it is not until the
age of steamships and railways that the mass-produced book, newspaper, and print market effectively permeated all social ranks.

p. 172 Most country booksellers acted as agents for central wholesalers (this practice seems to have been more important in Europe and
Japan than in China). By the early eighteenth century, bookseller-publishers in Leipzig, Amsterdam, Paris, and London were
including boasts of “available in every bookshop” in their imprints. In the final decades before the introduction of steam-driven
printing in the early nineteenth century, retail outlets for stationery and books existed in almost every European town. By the end of
the manual printing press period, the link was also clear, if unsurprising, between the production and distribution of books and the
commercial history of their cities of origin. The asymmetry of the flows of books corresponding to the social and political status of
58
vernacular languages has been given renewed attention. The archives of the Société de Neuchâtel, which have been so usefully
mined in tracing this traffic in Enlightenment Europe, have also been revisited in order to offer greater distinction between what was
59
ordered by booksellers across Europe and what was actually distributed (and the two were undoubtedly very different).

Schemes for assured custom, notably subscription editions, flourished during the second third of the eighteenth century and have
been the focus of several studies investigating the social and geographical profile of book subscribers. In France this largely
developed as two-stage marketing, where individuals bought subscriptions from booksellers who had bought them from publishers.
In Italy subscription editions proved extremely successful from the 1720s, responding in part to a crisis in market conditions and in
enabling risks to be widely shared. Subscription editions were indeed one of the few forms of book publication by country
booksellers in the eighteenth century. Even at their most popular, however, subscription editions were often special cases in a volatile
market. Some subscription lists were no more than an exercise in aristocratic name-dropping. Like the inclusion of prefaces by
60
famous men in Chinese books they were a commercial embellishment intended to give a work respectability and social cachet. At
the same time, the secondhand market for books and for whole and disassembled libraries, soared, aided by both auctions and
booksellers’ catalogs. The resale of printed and manuscript books and pamphlets accounts for a remarkable and ongoing
p. 173 redistribution of books across Europe and its colonies, also involving new business and advertising techniques. By the early
 nineteenth century, for example, many European booksellers reduced customers’ credit terms in return for the more assured
exchange of monies at the time of sale.

By this time also, a freer, more competitive, and expanding market, together with more efficient technologies and distributive
61
systems, provided enterprising publishers with unprecedented opportunities. This was true all over Europe, and indeed in the
extension of Europe overseas, but the revolution in the book trades was particularly marked in Britain which, from the eighteenth
century, changed from an obscure to a leading European book mart, and where, according to the crude title counts offered by
Peddie’s English Catalogue of Books during the nineteenth century, 25,000 book titles were published between 1800 and 1835 and
62
64,000 between 1835 and 1862. The use of cheaper raw materials and new industrial processes (notably in papermaking) lowered

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

unit costs and hugely improved the return on invested capital. Between 1846 and 1916, the volume of publication was to quadruple
63
while the average price of literature halved.

Even so, as Samuel Smiles conceded, in the mid-nineteenth century, publishing, however much directed by strong-minded bookmen,
64
remained in thrall to capital requirements, legal frameworks, technological constraints, and the efficiency of distribution networks.
Further pricing decisions and the advance of the early and mid-nineteenth-century wholesaling discount system depended upon
distribution and transport developments. Given the necessity of selling as quickly as possible the whole edition in which so much
was invested, the efficiency and cost of distribution remained critical.

In many ways, and especially at the dawning of the railway and steamship age, the 1840s marked a transition from one age of
bookselling to the next. The industrial, mass production of books accelerated after the mid-nineteenth century, before which the older
practices remained visible. In Britain, the struggles over copyright and taxation in the 1840s and the culmination of many decades of
p. 174 dispute and protest paraded, once again, passionate argument about the future of publishing and bookselling. Regional
booksellers as well as major international dealers were, however, restricted by limited financial structures. Given the modest scale of
regional economies and the absence of major technological advances, capital accumulation in the book trade and the expansion of
bookselling were held back less by shortages of savings than by difficulties in transferring economic surpluses to those sectors and
individuals requiring start-up or tie-over credit. Almost all credit requirements were short-term and bound not to servicing fixed
assets but to supplying the purchase of materials and to discounting bills of exchange to cash.

The country bookseller remained the prisoner of limited arrangements for long-distance credit. It was usually practical only for the
bookseller to negotiate terms with a single wholesaler, who then acted as an intermediary in dealings with other suppliers and
thereby limited competition that might have been helpful to the retailer. This arrangement was a comfortable one for the major
publishers. Trade discounts offered to the country retailer only came after the wholesale agent’s own cut from the original
publisher’s bulk discount. Across frontiers, risk could be lessened by the barter principle, with perhaps half payment in books and
half in real money. Immense difficulties were caused, however, by payments in foreign currency, negotiations over bills of exchange,
and disputes over exchange rates. This is apparent even in correspondence between booksellers and royal and state libraries begun in
65
earlier centuries and often conducted, like many commercial transactions, in fragile French.

The essential point in any short summary of this aspect of print history is the distinction between the functions of printing and of
publication. Publishers, financing publication and wholesaling the products, were sometimes also printers and stationers but
sometimes not (and were sometimes authors self-publishing). Retail or corresponding booksellers were usually separate again. From
the eighteenth century especially, many publishing booksellers financed publication and sold the books but commissioned printers to
undertake the manufacture of the volumes (sometimes using several printers for an extensive or complex edition). Restrictions
affected these trades in different ways. Imposed regulation curtailed publication and the selling of print, but the other checks, notably
transport and financial organization, changed as part of the development of other trading sectors. Similarly, while the printing
industry was not directly affected by relocational factors such as raw materials or the new sources of power transforming other
industries, the knock-on effects for distributional systems was great. These, however, were not allowed to develop uniformly, when
some states and some towns were restricted by imposed regulation of one sort or another.

p. 175 It is possible, therefore, to argue that in certain regions book-trades development was retarded because of the success of distribution.
State and guild regulations were breached almost everywhere from the mid-eighteenth century. The imposed regulations had
withstood the chaos of the mid-seventeenth-century wars but not the upheavals caused by the volume of increased publication, itself
responding to new possibilities of distribution. When, in many countries, marketing risks fell significantly from the end of the
seventeenth century, with improved credit arrangements and lowered costs of advertising, the effects of earlier printing and
publishing regulation continued. The continuation of old practices could be true even in regions where newspapers offered both new
advertising opportunities and new delivery networks to ease book delivery. The concentration of book trades in one particular center,
for example, constrained development as well as promoted it. In centralized states there followed a boom in publication but not in
the number of new publication centers, where imposed regulation had weakened or even suppressed provincial printing. One of the
most remarkable examples was also the area of fastest growth, eighteenth-century England. After the nonrenewal of the licensing
laws in 1695, the expansion in the English provincial trade was, in effect (and with the important exception of newspaper and
 jobbing printing), increased distribution of a hugely increased London product. London imprints still accounted for 95 percent of all
English publications in 1800.

Concluding Observations

In broad summary, distribution remained a crucial variable in the development of publishing in Europe and in its colonies. Transport
costs remained consistently high in the first centuries after Gutenberg, and the transformation in the economics of book distribution,
and later, newspaper and journal distribution very obviously affected marketing strategies and calculations for text and edition

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

production. Improvements in transport routes and distance times encouraged the development of discount systems to promote greater
retail distribution in the country. Distribution costs were always a significant add-on. With most booksellers’ commercial
calculations (even when swopping stock) allowing little scope for major tie-ups of capital in printed and warehoused volumes, the
efficiency of transportation remained critical (and even though carriage costs were usually a further expense underwritten by
publishers and book merchants). Transport underpinned the urgency of selling editions in which so much was usually invested. Nor
was cheap print excluded from this assessment.

Recognition of the importance of noncommercial publishing in East Asia, as argued by Joseph McDermott, also offers suggestive
reassessment of the circulation of private and noncommercial texts in Europe The production of printed books and pamphlets paid
p. 176 for by authors or institutions and designed for private or closed institutional circulation can be obscured by attention to the
remarkable surge in commercial publication in early modern Europe. There is overlap with the small jobs, whose neglect has already
been noted as a significant caution to existing book histories. The development of transport routes and postal services assisted the
growth of correspondence but also private networks of private printing—less “publication” (where making things “public” was not
the intention) than privileged contact and discussion through the medium of print (but also by enduring manuscript and texts of
mixed print and script). The restricted distribution of books, such as genealogies solely to lineage family members, reminds us that
both printed and scribal production traveled along private, even surreptitious, channels to retain and most effectively exercise power
and influence. Such development, in Europe, China and Japan, also suggests the usefulness of regarding carting, delivery, and postal
services as the hiring of services to ensure distribution: functions that might be quantified and given economic value where sources
allow.

These interpretations lead to wider considerations for the writing of book history in Europe and especially in comparison to other
parts of the world. Focus upon changing distribution systems offers an opportunity for further consideration of the categorization of
publication. As revision to Chinese book history has shown, conventional categories of publications, even of the definition of genre,
can be unhelpful in charting the publication history and the social and political impact of texts. The more advanced research on
distributive systems in Europe and China highlights further the overlaps and fusions of forms, of the use, for example, of newspapers
for written news as copies were sent along the distribution network and between specific and identifiable producers and clients.
Conversely, increasing attention to the hybridity of the form of early modern Chinese publications encourages a reassessment of
Western categorization and might suggest new associations and crossovers: contents of the traveling peddlers’ trays, for example,
might reveal similarity of material form that derived as much from requirements of conveyance as from originating production.

Another observation concerns business history. Printing offered greater productivity, but the structural inflexibility in the book trades
put new emphasis on the problem of sale in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. A fifteenth-century trade of stationers,
capable of sending out a few manuscript copies and then up to 500 printed copies, was also the basis for a modern industry handling
hundreds of thousands of copies of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary tracts published in the final decades of the eighteenth
century. This situation would seem to differ from that in China, where the predominant type of publisher and type of operations
66
would vary more over time. In particular, the principal type of private publishing in the second century of Ming rule, as
McDermott’s chapter suggests, was arguably the largely noncommercial variety of family publishing. Nonetheless, a concurrent shift
p. 177 toward commercial publishing continued unabated, to the extent that it has been estimated to account for more than three-
quarters of all publications by the 1630s and thus to have deepened the publishing industry’s reliance upon the commercial
distribution of texts.

The turning point in mass international and national trading of books in Europe came with the breakdown of structural constraints on
distribution from the late seventeenth century and by new financial organization interlinked with new social, urban, formations. By
the second half of the eighteenth century almost every part of Europe was affected. Booksellers’ catalogs, issued and used by both
wholesalers and retailers, were originally the sole vehicles for notification and promotion of booksellers’ wares. Now they were
more widely available but were also only part of a broader commerce in print where distributional success limited as well as
promoted new printing and publishing initiatives. Thousands of book auction and sales catalogs were sent to individuals even in
frontier parts of Europe. In the eighteenth century, booksellers sent out some 10,000 catalogs from the Netherlands alone. A
continuing analysis should show how in different local networks the length of time between publication and end-sale was reduced
during the eighteenth century, and how minimum and maximum delivery times were also converging. The diversity of networks and
 the existence of different forms of distribution—and political and economic impediments—remain fundamental to book-trades
history in this period. In a way that is perhaps salutary to recent studies, it also gives more importance to supply factors than to
demand even though the question of market identification was always inherent to the evaluation of risk in distribution.

This leads, therefore, to a second general issue. Print enlarged but also created many different trading circuits, each with its own
mechanics, extent, and rate, and changing at different times. Further research should construct a cultural map identifying not only
early printing sites but also distribution points and routes, and the relationship between them. As the Frankfurt fair contracted, for
example, and the Leipzig fair became less international, competing centers with more vernacular printing created something which
looked more like national publishing areas—and yet this was at a time of wider penetration of an increased number of book-trading

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

circuits. Leipzig, after all, remained the place of publication of the Acta eruditorum, self-evidently international in character, and
Leipzig booksellers continued to advertise books belonging to the “Latin trade” in law, medicine, and theology. Of many other
examples of differently and importantly influential circuits, Jan Pirożyński has demonstrated how the Iter Italicum book route
67
p. 178 limited the much vaunted influence of England, the Netherlands, and France in the Polish Renaissance. There is similar
evidence of specific supply routes by booksellers in the Low Countries for the increased demand for print from the Counter-
Reformation Church. Not only did important Antwerp printers like the Moretuses and Verdussens print Roman liturgical books and
vernacular devotional Catholic literature, but so too did printers in the Protestant North such as the Elzeviers, Blaeu, Schipper, de
Lonne, and the Huguetan brothers. The comparison with early modern China is fascinating. Cynthia Brokaw and others emphasize
that the portability and simplicity of woodblock printing, together with the ready availability of cheap paper, enabled the expansion
of publishing sites, many outside established and major cities, even though Brokaw also stresses the continuing importance of
centralized sites and main distribution centers and areas frequented by producers and distributors alike.

In such ways the commercial history of book distribution offers important refinements and cautions to cultural histories of religious
and linguistic boundaries, institutional and pedagogical histories, and of intellectual history in its social context. It further supplies
empirical evidence in the continuing debate about the envisaging by state, trade, or consumer of a “public,” and about the
development of a marketplace of readers. The mapping of book circuits offers a new “nonnational” perspective on “home” markets
in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As guild and state regulation eased, international trading expanded, while new
national market development was even more pronounced. If one then views the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in
Western Europe as a period of unblocking of identified constraints to book circulation and production, rather than as crude linear
development, it gives much greater sense to contemporary perceptions of change. Many, such as Leibniz, had feared the
consequences of a great deluge of books. It explains the obsession with order in the architectural statements, both internal and
external, in library design, and the contradictory tensions in Enlightenment Europe, seen at quite humble levels as well as grand
ones, between the worship of literature and the desire to set up boundaries to reading, to offer countless reference works of the sort
described below by Peter Burke and Joseph McDermott, and to exclude those persons who could not be trusted to read properly.

In turn, close analysis of distribution suggests differences between the appearance and reality of the eighteenth-century reading
revolution by highlighting the distinction between publication profiles and the number of readers. Much of the increased demand for
new books from the late seventeenth century can be explained by greater purchasing and borrowing by those members of those
social classes already buying books, and by demand from churches and libraries, rather than by a markedly “widening circle” of
readership. Overall estimates might be given of about 3 million titles to approximately 1.5 billion copies of books published in
Europe in the eighteenth century, but the undoubted extension of reading almost certainly failed to keep pace with population
p. 179 growth. In the second half of the eighteenth century there was probably no increase at all in the numbers reading as a percentage
68
of the total population.

Such profiles of book distribution are complex and multidimensional. Literary consumption is determined not so much by social
stratification as by membership of particular libraries or reading or scientific societies. Much historical attention has been given to
literacy skills but far less to the economic constraints to access to print. Here, it can be argued, a comparison of book pricing to real
wage levels suggests that most new European books became more and not less of a luxury item relative to average purchasing power
69
during the eighteenth century. This in turn raises the question of the secondhand market and access to reading institutions. New
profiles of distribution patterns can complement book-ownership studies, where many inventories list numbers of “books” but not
titles or even categories.

Such cautions lead to one final consideration. It is salutary in a history of book distribution to consider demand for print not as
demand for reading but as demand for objects viewed as worthy of possession. In East and West, printing did introduce the luxury
book edition that was not to be read. As pointed out by Eugenio Garin long ago, we have to give attention to the number of books
70
shelved and not read; displayed and talked about but not read; fought over and sent round Europe and Asia as booty but not read.
The history of the book must encompass all aspects of possession and exchange. Such commerce is not always edifying, but it is
p. 180 fundamental, and its study does offer chastening review.
Notes

1. See David Rundle, ed., Humanism in Fi eenth-Century Europe: Medium Ævum Monograph vol. XXX (Oxford: Society for
the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2012) and especially his “Structures of Contacts”: 307–35.
2. See Joseph McDermottʼs chapter in this volume.
3. Ian Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: The Learned Book in the Age of the Confessional 1560–1630 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 5; cf. James Raven, “Book Distribution Networks in Early Modern Europe: The
Case of the Western Fringe (La rete distributiva del libro),” Produzione e commercio della carta e del libro secc. XIII–XVIII,
Istituto Internazionale de Storia Economica F. Datini Prato, 23 (1991): 583–630; and James Raven, “Selling Books across

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Europe,” Publishing History, 34 (1993): 5–20.
4. Magnificently disclaiming the trend is Giles Barber, The James A. De Rothschild Bequest: Printed Books and
Bookbindings (Aylesbury: The Rothschild Foundation, 2013).
5. Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, Biblioteka Ostatniego Jagiellona: Pomnik Kultury Renesansowej (Wroclaw: Zakład
Narodowy im. Ossoliń skich, 1988); Elmar Mittler and Wilfried Werner, Mit der Zeit: Die Kürfursten von der Pfalz und die
Heidelberger Handschri en der Bibliotheca Palatina (Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1986); Mathias Erzberger, Die
Säkularisation in Württemberg von 1803–1810 (Stuttgart: Aalen Scientia-Verlag, 1902); Alfons Maria Scheglmann,
Geschichte der Säkularisation in Rechtsrheinischen Bayern, 3 vol. in 4 (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1903–8); Eberhard Weis,
Die Säkularisation der Bayerischen Kloster 1802/03: Neue Forschungen zu Vorgeschichte und Ergebnissen (Munich:
Bayerische Akademie de Wissenscha en Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, 1983): 6; and Jörg-Ulrich Fechner, “English
Holdings from the Library of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince-Bishop of Wurzburg” (MLitt diss., Cambridge
University, 1972).
6. CCFr (Catalogue Collectif de France) is accessible via the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; more
advanced, but limited to pre-1701 imprints, is the German VD16 and VD17 (Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachaum
erschienenen Drucke des 16/17, Jahrhunderts—Bibliography of Books Printed in the German-Speaking Countries from
1501 to 1600 and from 1601 to 1700 respectively); VD18 is in the planning stages.
7. For Spanish printing, the Biblioteca Nacional de España has commenced an online STC of fi eenth-and sixteenth-
century imprints; and in Italy, EDIT16 Censimento nazionale delle edizioni del XVI secolo is also ongoing.
8. http://www.ustc.ac.uk/#; see also Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby, and Alexander Wilkinson, eds., French
Vernacular Books: Books Published in the French Language before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Alexander S. Wilkinson,
“Lost Books Printed in French before 1601,” The Library 7th ser. 10: 2 (June, 2009): 188–205.
9. Otto S. Lankhorst, “Nos espoirs sont surtout tournés vers les pays de lʼEurope de lʼEst,” in C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, H.
Bots, P. G. Ho ijzer, and O. S. Lankhorst, eds., Le Magasin de lʼUnivers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European
Book Trade (Leiden: Brill, 1992), esp. 206.
10. Pioneering contributions include Keith Thomas, “Numeracy in Early Modern England,” Trans. Royal Historical Society,
5th ser., 37 (1987): 103–32; Peter L. McMickle and Richard G. Vangermeersch, The Origins of a Great Profession
(Memphis, TN: Academy of Accounting Historians, 1987); Patricia Kline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of
Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); ibid., “Reckoning with Commerce:
Numeracy in Eighteenth-Century America,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1992): 320–34; and Margaret Spu ord, “Literacy, Trade and Religion in the Commercial Centres of
Europe,” in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen, eds., A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 229–84.
11. Various examples are given in James Raven, “Choses banales, imprimés ordinaires: ʻtravaux de villeʼ, lʼéconomie et le
monde de lʼimprimerie que nous avons perdus,” Histoire et civilisation du livre: revue internationale 9 (2013 [2014]):
243–58.
12. The list is extremely extensive. For a brief account of Chinese examples of Chinese ephemera including jobbing, see
Qian Yongxing, Minjian riyong diaoban yinshua pin tuzhi (Yangzhou: Guangling shushe, 2010).
13. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979):
15; Aleksander Frøland, Dansk Boghandels Historie, 1482 til 1945: Med et Kapitel om Bogen i Oldtid og Middelalder
(Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974): 22–31; Max Rooses, Christophe Plantin, Imprimeur Anversois (Antwerp: J. Maes, 1882):
168–76; Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Peter Schő er of Gernsheim and Mainz (Rochester, NY: Printing House of L. Hart,
1950): 97; Oskar von Hase, Die Koberger: Eine Darstellung des Buchhändlerischen Geschä sbetriebes in der Zeit des
Űberganges vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hä rtel, 1885); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Carlos Gilly, Spanien und der
Basler Buchdruck bis 1600 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1985).
14. See Cynthia Brokawʼs contribution to this volume.
15. Cited in Adrian Wilson, The Making of the Nuremberg Chronicle (Amsterdam: A. Asher, 1976): 209.
16. Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: 175.
17. Jan Pirożyński, “Royal Book Collections in Poland during the Renaissance,” Libraries and Culture 24 (1989): 21–32, esp.
21.
18. The earliest record of a printer-publisher trading at the Frankfurt fair is for 1478: Hase, Die Koberger: 318. There were
also fairs at Paris, Vienna, and Nurernberg; see John L. Flood, “ʻOmnium totius orbis emporiorum compendiumʼ: The
Frankfurt Fair in the Early Modern Period,” in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Fairs, Markets
and the Itinerant Book Trade (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and London: British Library, 2007).
19. Graham Pollard and Albert Ehrman, The Distribution of Books by Catalogue from the Invention of Printing to AD 1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and James W. Thompson, ed., Henri Estienne, The Frankfort Book Fair:
 Henricus Stephanus II: Francofordiense Emporium, 1574 (Amsterdam: G. Th. van Heusden, 1969).
20. See Brokaw in this volume.
21. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver, BC: University of British
Columbia Press, 2004).
22. See Brokaw in this volume.
23. Sten G. Lindberg, “The Scandinavian Book Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” in Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian, eds.,
Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtezehen Jarhundert (Hamburg: Hauswedell, 1981): 225–48; and Harald L.
Tveterås, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Norwegen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992).
24. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrimʼs Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004); cf. Michael Winship, “The Transatlantic Book Trade and Anglo-American Literary Culture in the

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

Nineteenth Century,” in Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams, eds., Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution,
and Consumption in America (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999): 98–122.
25. Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de lʼAmérique française, new edition (Paris: Flammarion, 2008).
26. Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949); Claudia Schnurmann,
“Kommunikation und soziale Netzwerke: Beziehungen zwischen Bewohnern englischer und niederländischer Kolonien
in der amerikanisch-atlantischen Welt, 1648–1713” (unpublished Habilitationsschri , Göttingen University, 1995);
Gregg Roeber, “German and Dutch Books,” in Hugh Amory and David. Hall, eds., The Colonial Book in the Atlantic
World: The History of the Book in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 298–313; and Hendrik
Edelman, The Dutch Language Press in America (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1986).
27. James Raven, “The Importation of Books in the Eighteenth Century,” in Amory and Hall, eds., Colonial Book in the
Atlantic World: 183–98.
28. For further examples, see James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community
and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002).
29. David Cressy similarly warns of adjacent research that “low literacy rates in the early modern period should not be
taken as indicators of retardation or deprivation, awaiting rectification by progress,” “Literacy in Context: Meaning and
Measurement in Early Modern England,” in Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods: 305–19.
30. Notably, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ʻEncyclopédieʼ, 1775–1800
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, La Censure des livres à Paris à la fin de
lʼancien régime (1750–1789) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); Michael Harris and Robin Myers, eds.,
Censorship and the Control of Print in Britain and France (Winchester: St. Paulʼs Bibliographies, 1992); and Anne
Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1995).
31. Hans Widmann, Geschichte des Buchhandels vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1975); A. H.
Laeven, “The Frankfurt and Leipzig Book Fairs and the History of the Dutch Book Trade in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” in Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., Le Magasin de lʼUnivers: 185–97; and Friedrich Kapp and Johann
Goldfriedrich, Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels (Leipzig: Börsenverein der deutschen buchhändler, 1886–1913).
32. Iaroslav Isaievych, “The Book Trade in Eastern Europe in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in Brewer
and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods: 381–92.
33. Ibid.: 389; and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, “The Hebrew Book Trade in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century,” in Berkvens-
Stevelinck, et al., Le Magasin de lʼUnivers: 155–68.
34. Renata Żurkowa, “Stosunki zawodowe ksiçgarzy Krakowskich w pierwszej polowie XVII wieku,” Roczniki Biblioteczne
Polskiej Akademii Nauk w. Krakowie, Vol. 31: 1 (1987): 49–92; and Iaroslav lsaievych, Bratstva ta ikh rolʼv rozvyktu
Ukraïnsʼkoï kulʼtury XVI–XVII st (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1966).
35. Darnton, Business of Enlightenment: 246. It is, perhaps, the major weakness of Graham Pollardʼs Sandars Lectures,
reprinted as “The English Market for Printed Books,” Publishing History 4 (1978): 7–48. An authoritative revision is
o ered by Giles Barber, “Book Imports and Exports in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris,
eds., Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982): 77–105; see also Elizabeth
Armstrong, “English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent,” English Historical Review, 94 (1979): 268–90; and
the maps by D. Hume, especially “The Extent of Publishing within the European States [1701–1751 and 1751–1800],” in
F. J. G. and J. M. Robinson and C. Wadham, comps., Eighteenth-Century British Books: An Index to the Foreign and
Provincial Imprints in the Author Union Catalogue (Newcastle upon Tyne: Avero [Eighteenth-Century] Publications,
1982).
36. Gary Marker, Publishing, Printing, and the Origins of Intellectual Life in Russia, 1700–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1985): 18, 152; Iosif E. Barenbaum, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Russland und der Sowjetunion
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991); Sergei P. Luppov, Kniga v Rossii v XVII veke (Leningrad: “Nauka,” Leningr. otd-nie,
1970); and Sergei P. Luppov, ed., Kniga i ee Rasprostranenie v Rossii v XVI–XVlII vv: Sbornik Nauchnykh Trudov
(Leningrad: BAN, 1985).
37. Ian Maclean, “Melanchthon at the Book Fairs, 1560–1601: Editors, Markets and Religious Strife,” in Günter Frank and
Kees Meerho , eds., Melanchthon und Europa 2 vols. [part of Günter Frank and Martin Treu, general eds., Melanchthon-
Schri en der Stadt Bretten, no. 6] (Stuttgart: Thorbecke, 2002), 2: 211–32, esp. 214); Clair, “Christopher Plantinʼs Trade-
Connexions”: 41–42; and Ian Maclean, “The Market for Scholarly Books and Conceptions of Genre in Northern Europe,
1570–1630,” reprinted in Ian Maclean, Learning and the Market Place: Essays in the History of the Early Modern Book
(Leiden: Brill, 2009): 9–24.
38. Laurence Fontaine, History of Pedlars in Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
39. Jean-François Botrel, Les aveugles colporteurs dʼimprimés en Espagne (Paris: Mé langes de la Casa de Velàzquez, 1973).
40. Clive Gri in, “Itinerant booksellers, printers, and pedlars in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal,” in Myers, Harris,
and Mandelbrote, eds., Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade: 43–60; Betty Naggar, Jewish Pedlars and Hawkers,
1740–1940 (Camberley: Porphyrongenitus, 1992); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993): 16–21, 323; and for enduring circuits in Ireland, see Niall OʼCiosáin, Print and
Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), and Niall OʼCiosáin, chapter 15 of James H.
Murphy, ed., The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume IV: The Irish Book in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
41. Aleksej Kalc, Alba Zanini, Alessandro Giacomello, and Alberto Milano, Guziranje dalla Schiavonia veneta allʼOngheria
con le stampe dei Remondini z Beneškega na Ogrsko s tiskovinami Remondini (Stregna: Comune di Stregna, 2009).
42. Jeroen Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023

1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
43. “The Pedlar and the Dissemination of the Printed Word” project directed by Jeroen Salman, Karen Bowen, and
Roeland Harms 2006–2010, and divided into three closely connected projects: social and economic research of the
distribution network, the process of representation, and the itinerant dissemination of printed news.
44. See McDermottʼs chapter in this volume.
45. Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, “Miejsce książki w kulturze polskiej XVI wieku” in Andrzej Wyczański, ed., Polska w epoce
Odrodzenia (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 1986); and Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, ed., Drukarze dawnej Polski, vol. 1:
Małopolska: Od XV do XVI wieku (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossoliń skich, 1983).
46. Justyna Kiliańczyk-Zięba, “In Platea Columbarum: The Printing House of Hieronim Wietor, Łazarz Andrysowic and Jan
Januszowski in Renaissance Krakow,” Publishing History, 67 (2010): 5–37; and Monika Jaglarz, Księgarstwo krakowskie
w XVI wieku (Krakow: Tow. Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa, 2004): 65–75.
47. For the continuing union catalog project see Maria Zychowiczowa, Centralny katalog starych druków w Bibliotece
Narodowej w Warszawie (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1995).
48. Frøland, Dansk boghandels historie 1482 til 1945.
49. James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007), chs. 2 and 3.
50. Gina Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
51. Howard Robinson, The British Post O ice: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948): 23–46.
52. Charles Wilson, First with the News: The History of W. H. Smith, 1792–1972 (London: Cape, 1985).
53. Jean-Yves Mollier, Louis Hachette (1800–1864): le fondateur dʼun empire (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
54. See, for example, Guinevere L. Griest, Mudieʼs Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington, IN: University
of Indiana Press, 1970).
55. Simon Eliot, “Bookselling by the Backdoor: Circulating Libraries, Booksellers, and Book Clubs, 1876–1966,” in Robin
Myers and Michael Harris, eds., A Genius for Letters (Winchester and London: St. Paulʼs Bibliographies, 1995).
56. The best-known published collection is Sigfred Taubert, Bibliopola: Bilder und Texte aus der Welt der Buchhandels
(Hamburg: Hauswedel, 1966).
57. Bert van Selm, Een menighte tre elijcke boecken. Nederlandse boekhandelscatalogi in het begin van de zeventiende
eeuw (Utrecht: HES, 1987); Reinhard Wittmann, ed., Bücherkataloge als buchgeschichtliche Quellen in der frühen
Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: In Kommission bei Harrassowitz, 1984); and A. N. L. Munby and L. Coral, British Book Sale
Catalogues: A Union List (London: Mansell, 1977).
58. Je ery Freedman, Books Without Borders in Enlightenment Europe: French Cosmopolitanism and German Literary
Markets (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
59. Simon Burrows and Mark Curran, comps., The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769–1794: Mapping the
Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (FBTEE) project and database; and Mark Curran, Selling
Enlightenment: Exploring the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade from Neuchâtel (forthcoming).
60. P. J. Wallis, “Book Subscription Lists,” The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974): 255–86; F. J. G. Robinson and P. J. Wallis, Book
Subscription Lists: A Revised Guide (Newcastle upon Tyne: H. Hill, 1975); W. Kirsop, “Pour une histoire bibliographique
de la souscription en France au XVllIe siecle,” in G. Crapulli, ed., Trasmissione dei Testi a Stampa nel Periodo Moderno
(Rome: Edizione dellʼAteneo, 1987), v. 2: 255–82; and Françoise Waquet, “Book Subscriptions in Early Eighteenth-
Century Italy,” Publishing History 33 (1993): 77–88, noting further studies.
61. James Raven, “British Publishing and Bookselling: Constraints and Developments,” in Jean-Yves Mollier and Jean
Michon, eds., Les mutations du livre et des lʼéditions dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à lʼan 2000 (Quebec City, QC: Presses
de lʼUniversité Laval, 2001).
62. Robert Alexander Peddie, The English Catalogue of Books (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1836–1901), 7 vols.
63. Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003):
158.
64. John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm, 1988): 129–79; Aled Jones, Powers of the Press:
Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996): 1–28; John Sutherland,
“The Institutionalisation of the British Book Trade to the 1890s,” in Robin Myers and Michael Harris, eds., Development
of the English Book Trade 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981): 95–105; and David McKitterick, ed., The
Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume 6, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
65. P. G. Ho ijzer, “The Leiden Bookseller Pieter van der Aa (1659–1733) and the International Book Trade,” in C. Berkvens-
Stevelinck et al., Le Magasin de lʼUnivers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the International Book Trade (Leiden: Brill,
1992): 169–84, esp. 176.
66. See Brokawʼs chapter in this volume.
67. Pirożyński, “Royal Book Collections”: 21–24; Lienke Paulina Leuven, De boekhandel te Amsterdam door katholieken
gedreven tijdens de Republiek. (Epe: Hooiberg, 1951); I. H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse Bochhondel, 1680–1725
(Amsterdam, 1960–78); and Th. Clemens, “The Trade in Catholic Books from the Northern to the Southern
Netherlands, 1650–1795,” in Berkvens-Stevelinck et al., Le Magasin de lʼUnivers: 85–94.
68. Early revisionists were Joost J. Kloek and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, “The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Reading: A
Myth?” Trans. 7th International Congress on the Enlightenment (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1989): 645–51.
69. Raven, Business of Books: 301–3.
70. Eugenio Garin, LʼEducazione in Europa, 1400–1600: Problemi e Progammi (Bari: Laterza, 1957): 15–16.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hong-kong-scholarship-online/book/21012/chapter/180559798 by University of St Andrews Library user on 18 February 2023