Enlightenment bestsellers
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Bibliographic Information
Enlightenment bestsellers
（The French book trade in Enlightenment Europe, 2）
Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
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Note
Companion to: The French book trade in Enlightenment Europe I : Selling Enlightenment / by Mark Curran
Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-238) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This is a rich and path-breaking comparative study of reading tastes in the final years of old regime Europe. Based on extensive research in the account books of the Swiss publishers, the Societe Typographique de Neuchatel (STN), and related archives, it charts the dissemination of literature and reading tastes across Europe in the years leading up to the French revolution. In the process, it recasts our understanding of late 18th-century print culture and the contours of the enlightenment. The fruit of a widely acclaimed five year database project, the STN database, it is also a story of pioneering efforts to apply the latest digital technology and GIS mapping techniques to traditional historical and bibliographic problems.
Although written to serve as a standalone study, this book is ideally complemented by its companion volume, Mark Curran's The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I: Selling Enlightenment, which offers a radical reinterpretation of the structure and practices of the European book trade.
The STN database is now recognised as a cutting-edge digital project of global significance. Robert Darnton has called it "a prodigious accomplishment and a joy to use" while Jeremy Popkin adds, "No one working in the field of French Enlightenment studies ... can afford to ignore the rich mine of data that Simon Burrows and his collaborators have made accessible, in an eminently usable form, and the new possibilities it opens up for scholars." The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe I and II offer a roadmap of that data and what it can show us.
Table of Contents
1. At the Shield of Minerva
2. The Elusive Enlightenment
3. The Book in Enlightenment Culture
4. Searching (for) Enlightenment in a Swiss Printshop
5. The Intellectual Geography of the STN
6. Forgotten Bestsellers
7. Troubling Taxonomies
8. The Anatomy of the Illegal Sector
9. Enlightened Cosmopolitanism and Novel Concerns
10. Of Science, Faith and Reason
11. From Swiss Politics to Revolutionary History
12. Conclusion
Appendix 1: Designer Notes on the French Book Trade Database
Appendix 2: Towards a Digital History of the Book
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
