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In the United States, book history has been relegated to library schools and rare book collections. Step into any rare book room and you will find aficionados savoring bindings, epigones contemplating watermarks, érudits preparing editions of Jane Austen; but you will not run across any ordinary, meat-and-potatoes historian attempting to understand the book as a force in history. (p. 2.)
But bibliography need not be confined to problems such as how consistently compositor B misspelled the text of The Merchant of Venice or whether the patterns of skeleton formes reveal regularity in compositorial practices. Bibliography leads directly into the hurly-burly of working-class history: it provides one of the few means of analyzing the work habits of skilled artisans before the Industrial Revolution. (p. 2.)
The Enlightenment existed elsewhere, first in the speculations of philosophes, then in the speculations of publishers, who invested in the market place of ideas beyond the boundaries of French law. (p. 3.)
Nothing could have been better for business than the continued controversy and the volunteer corps of authors. (p. 11.)
What identified the Encyclopedists as a group was not their social position but their commitment to a cause. To be sure, many of them retreated when the cause was most in danger, but they left their mark on the book, and the book came to epitomize the Enlightenment. Through scandal, persecution, and sheer survival, the Encyclopédie became recognized, by friends and enemies alike, as the summa of a great intellectual movement, and the men behind it became known not merely as collaborators but as Encyclopédistes. Their work signaled the emergence of an 'ism.' (p. 15.)
About all one can conclude from the publishing history of the first edition is that its text came from a disparate group of writers who were united by a common commitment to the task; that its luxurious folio volumes went to wealthy and well-born readers scattered across Europe; and that it was extremely lucrative. (p. 17.)
By its very nature, the organization of publishing in France forced the Enlightenment underground and into exile---into the printing shops of Amsterdam, Bouillon, Geneva, and Neuchâtel; for how could the king sanction the printing of texts that challenged the basic values of the regime? (p. 28.)
It is worth noting that the Encyclopédie depended on combinaisons of money and power from the very beginning; that political and economic interests interwined throughout the earliest stages of its history; and that it worked its way into the social fabric of France because its backers knew how to weave around the contradictions that characterized the culture of the Old Regime. (pp. 32-33.)
One reason for Panckoucke’s alienation from the other members of the guild was that he did not do business as they did. Except for a few adventures, they tended to be conservative, to milk priviledge for sale books---classics, legal treatises, religious works, and the like---which brought them a relatively secure, regular, and restricted income. He speculated extravagantly on new books and enormous compilations: the thirty-volume Grand vocabulaire français, the twenty-three volume Abrégé de l’histoire générale des voyages, and the eighty-six-volume Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence. (pp. 68-69.)
And above all, his support of the government in its confrontation with the guild put him in a position to defend all of his interests by pulling strings in Versailles. (p. 71.)
That the state should defend a book it had prohibited eighteen years earlier may seem paradoxical, but no less paradoxical than the fact that it based its defense on a principle---priviliege---which called into question by its reforms and which the Encyclopédie itself undermined. The Old Regime was shot full of such contradictions, especially during its last years, when reformers attempted to remodel elements of the system without changing its structure. But one consistent motive ran through all the twists and turns of Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie policy: self-interest. Whatever his personal values and his friendships with the philosophes, he kept to an old-fashioned strategy of greasing palms and twisting arms. He was even ready to embrace his enemy if it would increase his profit margin. (p. 75.)
It illustrated the character of the book trade in Lyons, where the only law that counted was the iron law of the marketplace: maximize profits. (p. 134.)
But the pirates had always prospered by purging their editions of luxe typographique, as they called it. In this way, they undersold their French competitors and kept their profits high. Duplain had adopted this policy in the first place by reducing the text to the quarto format and eliminating most of the original plates. But the octavo publishers took it much further, and by pursuing their course as pirates, they unwittingly furthered a general cultural movement: the popularization of the Enlightenment. (p. 138.)
Panckoucke's ability to defend his privilege by invoking his protections was more important than the ownership of the privilege in itself. (p. 154.)
Before buying a book, the readers of the Old Regime inspected the merchandise carefully, rubbing the pages between their fingers, holding them up to the light, scrutinizing the shape of the characters, the clarity of the impression, the width of the margins, and the overall elegance of the design. (pp. 179-80.)
The most costly element in book production was paper. Paper obsessed eighteenth-century printers and determined many of their calculations. When they discussed pressruns, they often talked in reams and quires rather then in thousands and tokens. And when they made budgets for books, they figured in feuilles d’édition, that is, the cost of producing all the copies of one sheet, including composition, presswork, and paper. Those three elements varied with the size of the printing: on the one hand, the cost of setting the type remained the same, while the cost of the presswork increased with the number of copies printed; on the other, the cost of paper went up at a faster rate than that of composition and presswork combined. (p. 185.)
By the spring of 1779, the price of 20-livre carré had leveled off, and the supply system had adjusted to the Encyclopédie. But the adjustment had been slow and painful because the system responded poorly to short-term fluctuations. It moved at a pace that was set by an ancient style of market-place bargaining and by the more fundamental seasonality of nature. It worked well enough, however, to supply the raw material for 8,000 thirty-six-volume sets of Diderot’s great work. (p. 196.)
To see into the life behind a fingerprint in the Encyclopédie is to get some sense of how men moved through the obscure channels of working-class history, but Bonnemain’s thumbmark also can be studied for its typographical significance. It illustrates a point that is difficult to appreciate in an age of automation: the printers of the Old Regime left their mark on their books---literally, in Bonnemain’s case, and figuratively in all the others. For each workman stamped each page with something of his individuality, and the quality of his craftsmanship affected the success of the product. (p. 230.)
A quarto on the shelf would demonstrate its owner’s excellence in three capacities: as a man of taste, as a man of learing, and as a philosophe. Far from being incompatable, these roles complemented one another; and best of all, they were easy to play. (p. 261.)
Not surprisingly, the booksellers appear only as businessmen when seen through business letters, but they were also cultural agents who operated at the meeting point between literary supply and demand. When a publisher’s representative came through town, they often discussed public tastes in literature, and their discussions often influenced the publisher’s decision about what works to reprint and what genres to emphasize. (p. 270.)
If they only used their quartos to impress visitors, however, their behavior suggests the importance rather than the ineffectiveness of the book, for it seems significant that an Encyclopédie on the shelf could convey prestige, like a fake coat of arms or an artificial particule. Perhaps by 1780 prestige had shifted to the Enlightenment, and a new phenomenon, intellectual snobbery, had been born. (p. 321.)
But whatever they felt, they must have known that in their hands they were holding one of the most challenging books of their time, a book that promised to reorder the cognitive universe and that would therefore produce some gnashing of the teeth among the local priests---unless the priests themselves were subscribers. (p. 323.)
It was a brief moment when the businessmen spoke to each other only as human beings. Immediately afterward they resumed their commercial discourse, for the Encyclopédie was moving too fast, as a speculation, for them to pause and contemplate the constants of the human condition. It had been necessary for them to take stock of their affair in Lyons while Bertrand was dying in Neuchâtel. (p. 330.)
They (STN) had put their money on the most successful publishing venture of the century, and their partners had creamed off most of the profits, leaving them about half of what they should have earned. (p. 383.)
Is there another moral story? To the social historian, it reads like a Balzacian drama: the tale of a bourgeois entrepreneur who clawed his way to the top and then consumed his fortune conspicuously, in aristocratic abandon. In a way it is the story of French capitalism---of limited expansion and investment in status instead of production. And its supreme irony is that the vehicle for Duplain’s rise into France’s archaic hierarchy, only a few years away from destruction, was Diderot’s Encyclopédie.
Unlike Duplain, however, Panckoucke did not invest in books in order to get out of the trade. He never stopped running after bigger and better speculations. He was a fortune hunter, but he seems to have been moved by the love of the chase. (p. 393.)
The area around Neuchâtel was Rousseau territory, just as Ferney was a Voltaire site. The two philosophes had spent so much time in the vicinity of Swiss publishing houses that they gave new life to an old industry, and nothing stimulated the trade more than their deaths; for each of them left behind manuscripts that were spectacular in themselves and that at last made it possible for publishers to produce complete versions of their works. Moreover they had seemed to incarnate two aspects of the Enlightenment, and they died within two two months of each other in 1778. SO their deaths touched off terrific intrigues among publishers who speculated on Enlightenment. (p. 403.)
But Panckoucke’s book celebrated the coming of age of a new generation of intellectuals, and it differed significantly in tone from the Encyclopédie of the philosophes. (p. 447.)
In helping perfect the arts and sciences, his book would advance the cause of all mankind. Of course the people who bought it might be expected to appreciate that message better than the people who scavenged the rags for its paper and transformed the rags into reams and pulled the reams through the presses and hauled the printed sheets over mountains, valleys, rivers, and plains everywhere from Paris to Moscow. But Panckoucke did not pretend to make room for men of toil and sweat in his vision of the good life. He addressed his Enlightenment to the elite---to those capable of beauty, goodness, and happiness; for, as he concluded, “la naissance, le rang, la fortune, le talent, l’esprit, le génie, las vertu sont donc les grandes sources du bonheur.” (p. 449.)
The speculation on the Encyclopédie méthodique became so intertwined with the other Encyclopédie enterprises that its history cannot be understood separately from theirs. It was both a predecessor and a successor of the quarto, for it descended from Diderot’s project of 1778. While splicing together speculations on the Encyclopédie, Panckoucke also wove over other huge enterprises into his grand strategy of publishing. For a few months in 1778 and 1779, he almost monopolized the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon as well as the Encyclopédie. Although it is not possible to follow all of these speculations to their conclusion, it is important to appreciate their convergence; for they represent the final flowering of the Enlightenment under the Old Regime. The production of Lumières may have gone through a more critical period around 1750, when many of the great books first burst into print. But seen as a diffusion process, the Enlightenment went through an equally important phase in the late 1770s, when speculators scrambled furiously to produce massive editions of the works of the philosophes for a kind of “mass” audience---not the illiterate masses, of course, but ordinary readers scattered throughout western Europe. Although it has never been noticed, this second harvest of Enlightenment publishing deserves close study because it represents the high point in the spread of philosophic works before the Revolution. The Encyclopédie played a crucial part in the diffusion process, both in the 1750s and in the 1770s, both in its folio format and in-quarto, both as a collection of heresies and as a compendium of sciences. The scientific element predominated in the ultimate Encyclopédie of the Enlightenment, but Panckoucke had hardly published half of it before 1789, when the fate of his final speculation became bound up with the fate of France in a revolution that transformed the organization of culture as well as society and politics. (pp. 458-59.)
Panckouke realized in retrospect that his timing could not have been worse: “Nou touchions alors à jamais mémorable... La Révolution, qui n’a point tardé à éclater, qui a renversé tant d’états, de fortunes, détruit les plus brillantes espérances, m’a attaqué dans tous les sens.” Actually, the Revolution did not openly attack Panckoucke, but it damaged his Encyclopédie in three ways: it drove off many of the subscribers, scattered several of the authors, and ruined most of the printers. Yet it did not destroy the book. (p. 481.)
Although one cannot see through to the reality behind Panckoucke’s rhetoric, his situation could not have been hopeless, or he would have abandoned the Méthodique. Perhaps he held on to it for personal rather than financial reasons, for he had invested hope and ambition as well as capital in it, and he wanted to build it into the greatest publication of all time. (pp. 489-90.)
The century had shifted in its course; Encyclopedism had been swept aside by Jacobinism; and he had finally decided to withdraw from the rush of events to a position in which he could safely tend to his spleen. (p. 494.)
The French Revolution was among other things a cultural revolution. Panckoucke had built his publishing empire at the center of the cultural system of the Old Regime. he and the Revolution were bound to come into conflict, no matter how hard he maneuvered and reworked his combinaisons. The fundamental principle of culture, as of society, under the Old Regime was privilege---that is, “private law” or the exclusive right to engage in some activity. Far from being restricted to the nobility, privilege ran through all segments of French society, including those where the printed word was a major source of income. The thirty-six privileged printers of Paris maintained a monopoly of their craft in the capital, and they worked in league with the most powerful booksellers, who monopolized the book trade through an exclusive guild. Books themselves carried privileges, or exclusive rights to the reproduction of their texts, which the Parisian administered in such a way as to exclude the members of the provincial guilds. … Panckoucke had become a grand master of this system, and he had based his Encyclopédie speculations on a strategy of privilege and protection. Yet he favored liberal reforms, even at the expenses of the guild, though not of his own interests, as evidenced by his support of the edicts on the book trade in 1777. His books spread Enlightenment---not radical Rousseauism, to be sure, but the advanced tendencies of science and literature represented by the Encyclopédie méthodique. It would be inaccurate to picture him as a reactionary, and it would be anachronistic to assume that progressive elements could not have germinated within the old, closed, corporate culture. but that culture was incompatible with the Revolution, and it had left its mark on the Méthodique---in the book’s privilege, for example, which must have looked “Gothic” to revolutionary readers. (pp.  496-98.)
Strictly speaking, Panckoucke was right: although he had played his privileges for all they were worth, he had helped to reform the old system of perpetual privileges in books. But the revolutionaries did not settle for reform, while Panckoucke favored half-way measures. He brought to the Revolution the same esprit de combinaisons that he had used in his publishing ventures---a preference for maneuvering and devising expedients instead of forcing issues. (p. 500.)
The book was a essentially a product of the Old Regime. Despite Panckoucke’s attempts to paint it over in the colors of the republic, it expressed a contradiction that ran throughout French culture in the 1780s: it was progressive but privileged, avant-garde in its science but dedicated to the gens en place on its title pages---in short, a combinaison of elements that looked incompatible after the rise of Jacobinism. (p. 510.)
The Revolution had not eliminated intellectual elitism but had cast it in a new form, wiping out privilege and advancing professionalization. (p. 518.)
It was not a common political faith that united the Encyclopedists and gave cohesion to their work but rather an underlying tide that swept all learning in the direction of professionalism. Encyclopedism as an “ism” remained complex and contradictory. But as a phase of intellectual development in the late eighteenth century, it expressed a tendency for knowledge to concentrate among experts and for experts to be drawn into the service of the state---a tendency that had gathered force under Louis XVI, that became crucial for the salut public in 1793-1794, and that did not disappear from history after the French Revolution. (p. 519.)
… to see beyond the book into the lives of the men who made it is to sense the vastness of the human experience which the Encyclopédie embodied. (p. 522.)
The Revolution destroyed privilege, the fundamental principle of the Old Regime, and then it built a new order around the principles of liberty and equality. Those abstractions may sound empty today, but they were full of meaning for the revolutionary generation of Frenchmen. The history of the Encyclopédie shows how they became expressed in print, disseminated in the social order, embodied in institutions, and incorporated in a new vision of the world. (p. 545.)