Pirating and Publishing

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" -- countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland -- pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France,
where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged -- tacitly or openly -- that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership
within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.

Darnton's book focuses principally on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, he offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France--a vibrantly detailed
inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters -- lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists -- this new book expands upon on Darnton's celebrated work on book-publishing in
France, most recently found in Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.

"All of the known universe is governed solely by books," Voltaire asserted, looking back at the end of his life on the battles he had fought against prejudice, ignorance, and injustice. The Enlightenment as a whole was driven by the power of books. Yet under the Ancien R�egime, the book trade was encumbered by conditions that would seem impossible today. There was no liberty of the press, no copyright, no royalties, no returns, and no limited liability. There were virtually no authors who lived from their pens, very few banks, and very little money-none, in fact, that took the form of paper bills guaranteed as legal specie by the state. How could books become such a force under such conditions? This book is meant to explain their power by showing how the publishing industry operated. It explores the ways that publishers behaved--their modes of thought and their strategies for translating intellectual capital into commercial value. Of course, the power of books lay primarily in their contents: the crack of Voltaire's wit, the grip of Rousseau's passion, the audacity of Diderot's thought experiments have rightly won recognition at the heart of literary history. But that history has not taken adequate account of the middlemen who brought literature to readers. Publishers played a decisive role at the juncture where literary, political, and economic history flowed into each other"--