The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, 1769-1787

Project start date: 2006-11

Project end date: 2011-05

This project will map the French book trade across late-Enlightenment Europe in order to chart best-selling texts and authors; reading tastes across Europe; changing patterns of demand over time; and networks of exchange in the print-trade. As French was the international language of the period, and widely read by Europe's elites, the project will be of interest to all scholars of the European enlightenment, not merely those with interests in French history and literature. The database of the book trade created by the project will be freely available to the wider academic community. The project uses the richest available representative source for this purpose, the business records of a Swiss publishing house called the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN). It aims to document the dissemination of books and ideas, bestselling texts and book trade networks in the period 1769-1787. The project's outputs will include a database of the STN's book trade transactions and at least two books. The STN also had clients in cities all over Europe, including major booksellers and publishers in Dublin, London, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid, Warsaw, Naples, as well as the German and French-speaking countries. This makes it possible to use the STN archives as the basis for international comparisons across Europe during the late Enlightenment.