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Amert (Kay)

University of Iowa

Intertwining strengths : Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne.

Read simply as lists, the publishing programs of the Paris printers Simon de Colines and his step-son, Robert Estienne, are much alike. Both published important editions of the Bible, for example, and notable series of Latin classics. Their fonts were remarkable, as well, setting the standard for the typographic practice of the early sixteenth century and beyond. The similiarities are in fact so many that some scholars have posited a relation of aesthetic or commercial rivalry between them.

While dramatic, such a view may obscure important cultural dimensions of their achievement. Competition was keen among book publishers in this period, but the expansion of literacy also was creating broader audiences and deeper, newly differentiated markets for printed books. Colines focused his inventiveness as a publisher on service to a community of university students and scholars; Robert Estienne focused his on younger students and literate, increasingly sophisticated professionals. Thus while both served a Latin-reading public, Colines' program addressed the needs of a growing, but well established audience, while Robert Estienne's addressed those of an emerging one, something that is reflected in the contrasting apparati offered in their books.

Both used distinguished fonts developed by Colines for use in scholars' books, but Robert Estienne transferred these fonts, bringing them into use by a broader public. Both sought and won the support of the court for their efforts as publishers, but Robert Estienne later needed its protection, as well. Although mostly unremarked in the literature, such differences reveal a fascinating intertwining of the strengths of the two, a phenomenon that ultimately merged scholarly and more broadly public communicative practices. Seen from this perspective, the relation between Simon de Colines and Robert Estienne is better characterized as one of astute cooperation and continuous collaboration.

The paper will be based on comparison of the publishing programs of Colines and Estienne, on archivally-based case studies of selected titles, and on close comparison of fonts.

Kay Amert is Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Director of the Typography Laboratory at the University of Iowa.

Andreoli (Ilaria)

enssib, Lyon

Le livre illustré lyonnais de la Renaissance : modèle et reflet de la culture artistique européenne.

Lyon fut sans conteste un des plus importants centres typographiques européens de la Renaissance, et livre lyonnais doit son essor, son originalité, son succès et son développement à la beauté, incontestablement, de son illustration.

Par sa position géographique, à mi-chemin entre le monde du Nord – Flandres, Allemagne et Suisse – et les deux péninsules méditerranéennes – Espagne et Italie - Lyon fut un carrefour d’échanges culturels et commerciaux. Si ses foires et ses banques attiraient depuis le XV siècle les riches marchandes, on assistait, dans les ateliers des ses imprimeurs, à la transmission écrite d’une grande partie du savoir de l’époque. Beaucoup d’imprimeurs italiens et nordiques vinrent s’établir à Lyon au début du XVI siècle et copièrent à s’y méprendre les éditions de leurs pays d’origines : c’est ainsi que l’influence italienne - surtout vénitienne - se fondait avec les modèles germaniques - surtout genevoises et baloises avec Holbein – donnant, pour les meilleurs exemples, un style plutôt original. Les protagonistes de cette première saison du livre lyonnais à figures sont Guillaume II Le Roy, George Reverdy et un autre maître anonyme.

Vers 1550, Lyon ne fut surpassé que par Venise pour la qualité artistique, la correction de ses éditions et la variété des matières traitées. Stimulés par la perfection de leur modèles, les artistes lyonnais se débarrassèrent vite de la lourdeur et de la rudesse qui caractérisaient leurs premiers essais. Les grands libraires, qui exercent toujours une action personnelle sur l’illustration des livres qu’ils publiaient, intéressés commercialement à enrichir leurs éditions de belles figures, secondèrent ces efforts avec intelligence. Jean de Tournes eut la chance d’attacher à sa fortune Bernard Salomon, dont le style emprunte les formes de Primatice et de l’école de Fontainebleau, tandis que le suisse Pierre Eskrich - inspiré lui même des stucs bellifontains tout en conservant une lourdeur plutôt allemande - et le fort mal connu « Maître à la capeline », émule de Bernard Salomon, furent les graveurs attitrés de Guillaume Rouillé. Balthasar Arnoullet s’intéressa plutôt à la publication des ouvrages scientifiques et à celle de plans de villes.

Après avoir donné un panorama des genres et typologies des livres à figures lyonnais et des éditeurs qui les ont produits, on proposera des exemples qui montrent comment ces illustrations ont été une source iconographique pour d’autres formes artistiques telles que la majolique, la boiserie et aussi le décor architectural, pas seulement en France, mais dans l’Europe entière.

Chercheur au Centre de recherche en histoire du livre de l’Enssib (Lyon), Ilaria Andreoli prépare une thèse d’histoire de l’art, aux universités de Lyon II et de Venise, sur le thème de l’illustration du livre entre Lyon et Venise au milieu du XVIe siècle.

Armbruster (Carol)

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Popularizing French culture in America 1870-1900 : The role of the Seaside Library series.

The Seaside Library Original Editions series was one of several American libraries that appeared in the mid- to late 1870s and lasted until the late 1880s. This series of cheap, numbered, mostly single-volume reprints of predominantly British and European novels was published in newspaper format. The format, unlike that of traditional books, allowed for high volume production and inexpensive, mass distribution throughout the United States by means of an extensive and efficient railroad system. Like newspaper readership, countrywide reading of the libraries’ novels created a type of shared community, a community that shared experiences and developed opinions nationwide.

Throughout the nineteenth century, contemporary mainstream French literature continued to occupy a high cultural place in British and American literary journals and higher education. French literature, as well as other aspects of French creative production, had long been admired, indeed often envied, by Anglo-Saxon culture. With the development and success of French feuilleton literature, a sensational literature, focused on current, real people and events in the sensational city of Paris, French newspapers, and subsequently book publishers, created an imaginary community through a print medium for a mass popular audience. That audience soon became international. Through translation, piracy, and the ever-increasing collaboration of the Anglo-American publishing worlds, French popular fiction – in all its genres and formats–entered into American markets and imaginations. The Americans, concurrently developing their own mass entertainment in print media, eagerly acquired, translated, distributed, and consumed what was French.

The Seaside Library, the largest and most successful of the American libraries, published a significant number of French authors and texts. The selection, the publishing volume and frequency and the distribution–domestic and international--played a role in the American experience of the French and their opinion of things French. This paper reviews these aspects of the Seaside titles to study the role played by this library in the creation of a popular profile of the French among the American reading public.

Since 1983 I have been the French Area Specialist in the European Division of the Library of Congress. I am also an advisory editor to Book History. I am the author of a number of articles on French and American publishing and cultural issues, e.g., “The Origins of International Literary Exchanges: Alexandre Vattemare’s Adventures in America,” Biblion 5, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 128-147. I organized the Library of Congress symposium and edited the proceedings entitled Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America (Greenwood, 1993). My current work focuses on French fiction translated and published in the United States during the nineteenth-century, especially that published in cheap formats. I have just completed an analytically descriptive bibliography of all numbers in the Seaside Library Original Editions series which were based on French authors and/or texts. The Library of Congress holds an archival collection of this series.

Augst (Thomas)

Uiversity of Minnesota

Aesthetic taste and the politics of virtue in 18th-century America.

For several decades, scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Michael Warner have located the orgins of modern American nationalism in the emergence of modern print culture. By standardizing and territorializing vernacular linguistic communities, print capitalism provided new ways for people to think about selves and relations to others in simultaneity. The newspaper and the novel created “confidence of community in anonymity” that is hallmark of the modern nation, and that defines citizenship as the symbolic identification of solitary readers with one another through mass-produced printed goods. As Michael Warner has emphasized, the abstract impersonality of political identity in Republican ideology of 18th century America was both a trait of the medium of print discourse, facilitated by pseudonymous publication in pamphlets and newspapers, and a norm for its subjects: the “public” only acquired identity “in the transmission of print,” and the universalizing discourse of the public sphere eliminated individual as particular (and embodied) presence.

This paper challenges the abstract model of community posited in this theory of nationalism by exploring the particular ways that aesthetic theory and experience defined the forms and psychology of political engagement in the Revolutionary and Early National United States.

Surveying print discourse in Boston in the 1780s, this paper explores the ways that diverse modes of aesthetic experience — musical, theatrical, and literary — figured in larger debates about the Republican morality, cosmopolitanism, and the education of citizens in the new nation. I focus

in particular on three discrete artifacts in which the virtue of political subjects became, within a specific social and historical context, the contested problem of taste: the newspaper debates surrounding the opening of a music hall called the Pantheon; the short-lived publication, The Boston Magazine (1786) which reprinted excerpts of continental aesthetic philosophy and an assortment of belles-lettristic efforts, and William Halliburton’s proposal for the creation of a state theatre in Boston (1791). What do these artifacts tell us about how civic virtue was experienced in the sensory perceptions of eye and ear, divided in the ‘faculties’ of reason and imagination, dispersed among particular spaces of the elite salon, the popular stage, and printed page? Together, when read within a historical context of social and political upheaval, these episodes suggest not only how the political subject was embodied in elite and popular modes of leisure and consumption, but also contested among competing media of print discourse. I suggest that we understand the displacement of Republicanism by Federalism in part as an aestheticizing of politics, which naturalized citizenship in the cultivation of taste in the institutions, practices, and objects of the marketplace.

Thomas Augst is Assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2003), and the coeditor of Libraries as Agencies of Culture (Wisconsin, 2002). He is currently working on a new project about melodrama and citizenship.