B

Bacconnier (Brigitte)

enssib, Lyon

Joseph et Pierre-Jacques Duplain, deux hommes du livre aux ambitions bien opposées 1774-1794.

Résumé

Comment deux hommes issus d'une famille de libraires lyonnais respectée ont-ils eu des destins bien différents grâce au commerce du livre. Comment ils ont contribué à la circulation du livre entre Lyon, Paris et Neuchâtel. Quel a été leur rôle dans le commerce du livre prohibé ? Comment l’un a travaillé avec un groupe d’hommes restreint et l’autre avec un réseau soigneusement et longuement préparé.

Joseph contribua à la diffusion de l'encyclopédie de Diderot au seul but de s'enrichir et d'arriver près du roi à Paris où il prit le nom de Duplain de Sainte Albine. Soupçonné de royalisme, il est arrêté en 1794 et exécuté à l’âge de 46 ans.

Pierre-Jacques, amoureux des livres a une bonne pratique de la librairie, que ce soit pour les livres neufs ou les livres anciens, à Lyon puis à Paris. Il a su tisser un réseau afin d’améliorer son commerce, que ce soit auprès de gens de lettre ou bien des gens d’affaires, des avocats, des procureurs. En vue de faire la « commission » à Paris, il parcourt l’Allemagne, la Hollande, l’Angleterre et le Nord afin de trouver des correspondants.

Il va traverser la révolution non sans mal et continuer son commerce dans la librairie à Paris.

Abstract

The advancment of a family, the Duplains, in  XVIIIth century Lyons book trade.  The destiny of men from three generations:  Marcellin, the pioneer, Benoît, the bold, Pierre, the wise, Joseph the grasping and Pierre-Jacques the traveller.   A vision of the book trade, honest for some, underground for others.  Amongst their production : Lyons' publications, illegal books and the venture of Diderot's encyclopedia.

Brigitte Bacconnier, professeur certifiée, prépare une thèse sur la famille Duplain, sous la direction de Dominique Varry, dans le cadre du Centre de recherche en histoire du livre de l’Enssib (Lyon).

Baggs (Chris)

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

George Gissing and libraries.

Books, serials, reading and using libraries form a significant element in George Gissing’s fiction - and not just the British Museum Library and the world of novel writing and review journals in New Grub Street. Personal libraries are outlined in Demos, The Odd Women and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft; a workers’ Book Club is established in Workers of the Dawn; a critical scene in In the Year of Jubilee takes place around a Teignmouth circulating library; books are borrowed from circulating libraries in The Odd Women, New Grub Street, Demos; both Thyrza and Demos have examples of free philanthropically funded public libraries, à la People’s Palace; and the relatively new public libraries are referred to in Workers in the Dawn, and New Grub Street, when Marian Yule obtains a post as a public library assistant. In the short story Spellbound a public library reading room even acts as the main protagonist in the plot. Gissing did not just refer to all kinds of libraries in his works, but as a voracious reader, he made enormous use of them himself. This paper will concentrate on his use of public and circulating libraries (rather than others such as the British Museum and numerous examples from his continental travels), extracting the evidence from his diaries and letters. The focus will be on what Gissing read, where he borrowed his material from, which libraries he used, and what his views of these institutions were, not as author but as user. In his early career, following his sojourn in the United States in 1876/77, he regarded public libraries as a supplementary part of the formal education system required to educate the working class, whilst a subscription to a circulating library was a personal necessity.

Dr Chris Baggs, Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Main area of research is British public library history in the 19th and early 20th century, and working class reading habits, especially miners. Articles have been published in journals such as Library History, Libraries and Culture, and Book History. Conference papers have been given at SHARP (1997, 2001, 2003), the IFLA Conference (2002), the British Library Association Biennial Conference (2001) and the History of Libraries in the United States Conference (Philadelphia, 2002).

Barbier (Frédéric)

Ecole pratique des hautes études (IVe section), Paris et enssib, Lyon

Chair

Barnhill (Georgia B.)

Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA

With a French accent: American lithography 1825 to 1860.

Although much, if not most, of American printing expertise, beginning with the introduction of printing in the British North American colonies, came from Great Britain, there is one major exception—the practice of lithography. This new printmaking process was developed in Germany, but quickly spread to England, France, and Italy in the early nineteenth century. The first notice of lithography in America occurred in 1808 when the National Intelligencer and Washington Advisor noted “Dr. Mitchell of New York received a lithographic stone and inks from Paris and made some experiments in this new art.” The transmission of knowledge, expertise, and iconography continued for the next five decades. In the 1850s the French lithographers even provided lithographs reproducing the works of American artists for the art market in New York.

This illustrated presentation will discuss some highlights of the history of lithography in America beginning with the firm of Barnet and Doolittle. William Armand Barnet was the son of the American consul in Paris. He and Isaac Doolittle learned their craft in Paris, bringing drawing materials, stones, and a press to New York. The first major commercial firm in Boston likewise was founded upon French expertise. Other Frenchmen important in American lithography were Charles Alexandre Lesueur, Anthony Imbert, Edmé Rousseau, and Peter S. Duval. The firm of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives even hired French women to hand color their lithographs. French iconography was also a feature of American lithography. Examples of the transmission of imagery include the publication of a French print, Y Dit que vous avez une jambe de bois de naissance, which became an illustration in a pamphlet with images drawn on stone by the important American artist, Rembrant Peale.

The transmission of technology from France to the United States demonstrates the enlargement of American relationships with other European nations during the years of the New Republic.

Georgia Barnhill has been at the American Antiquarian Society for thirty-five years. She has written and lectured extensively on the history of American book illustration and prints. Recent articles include one on print collecting in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century, the markets for images in colonial America, and depictions of the White Mountains in the popular press. Last summer she spoke at SHARP on engravings published in the Atlantic Souvenir, a series of popular gift books published in Philadelphia.

Baron (Sabrina A.)

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 25 years on : a roundtable.

Within the field of book studies, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University Press, 1979) stands as an undisputed foundational text, helping to set a significant and wide-ranging scholarly agenda. It has crossed disciplinary, geographical, and temporal borders as scholars from around the world have applied and reworked Eisenstein’s model to investigate the role of print in cultural transformations that have occurred outside the work’s original focus on print in early modern Europe. Yet from the outset it was a book that inspired debate and provoked controversy. (Most recently, Adrian Johns’s The Nature of the Book [1998] and David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 [2003] have challenged fundamental aspects of her work.) Such debates point to the continuing vitality and impact of Eisenstein’s arguments. To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication, this session will examine the influence of the work, its current status within the interdisciplinary realm of book studies, the ongoing debates it has and continues to generate, and its potential future contributions to the field. The three organizers will open the session with brief presentations addressing the following topics:

– the role of Eisenstein’s pioneering study in the formation and development of print culture studies;

– the usefulness of her work both for understanding cultures of print beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of early modern Europe;

–the applicability of Eisenstein’s work for interpreting the electronic culture of our own technologically revolutionary moment.

The organizers’ collaborative research in the reception of and current applications of Eisenstein’s work for a forthcoming collection of essays will inform their presentations.

These presentations, in turn, will set the stage for a general discussion of Eisenstein’s work at its quarter-century mark. Given the sustained interest in the issues raised by The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, we anticipate a lively exchange among audience members. Our ultimate goal for this session is to chart the paths pursued, redirected, and unexplored by this seminal work and its readers.

Sabrina A. Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin are cofounders of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, a monthly forum that meets at the Library of Congress, and coeditors of the forthcoming Agent of Change: Twenty-five Years of Print Culture Studies (2005).

Sabrina A. Baron is coeditor of The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001) and editor of The Reader Revealed (2001), a Folger Shakespeare Library exhibition catalogue. Her articles on licensing for the press, early modern book collectors, pamphlet literature, and the politics of publishing in early modern England in journals such as Gutenberg Jahrbuch and volumes of collected essays such as Books and Readers in Early Modern England (2002). An independent scholar, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland for the 2002-2003 academic year. Awards have included two short-term Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship grants, travel grants from the National Science Foundation/Society for the History of Technology, and a Fulbright grant.

Beal (Shelley S.)

University of Toronto, Canada

Mary vs. Hubert, Montreal 1906 : A victory for international author's rights under the Bern Convention and for an emerging national literature in Quebec / Mary v. Hubert, Montreal 1906 : appel pour la fin du pillage des auteurs français au Canada et l'émergence d'une littérature nationale.

Résumé

Le 23 mars 1906, la Cour supérieure du Québec rendit sa décision en faveur du romancier Jules Mary, membre de la Société des gens de lettres de France, contre la publication non-autorisée et la vente au Canada du roman Tante berceuse de Mary par Barthélémy Hubert et la maison d'édition La Compagnie Générale de Reproduction Littéraire, de Montréal. Le procès fut le résultat d'une campagne soutenue, menée dans la presse des deux côtés de l'Atlantique par Louvigny de Montigny et l'Association des journalistes canadiens-français, également de Montréal. La campagne, par le biais d'une série de quarante-cinq articles parus entre 1903 et 1906 dans plusieurs périodiques canadiens, français et suisses, déplora le pillage au Canada des auteurs français et réclama les droits d'auteur sous la Convention internationale de Berne. Les premiers signataires de la Convention de Berne en 1886 inclurent la France, la Grande-Bretagne et ses colonies, dont le Canada. Montigny proposa par la même occasion le procès du Canada à ses collègues de la Société des gens de lettres à Paris, qui acceptèrent de l'intenter. Deux questions se posent: si la Convention de Berne était en vigueur depuis 1886 aux pays en question, pourquoi fut-il nécessaire d'intenter un procès vingt ans plus tard? Deuxièmement, que fut l'intérêt du Canadien Montigny à la protection des droits d'auteur des écrivains étrangers?

Cette communication offrira une description de la brillante campagne de relations publiques menée par Montigny, et éclairera les relations quelque peu compliquées entre les lois sur le copyright à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle, la contrefaçon littéraire (que l'on qualifie souvent de "piratage"), et l'émergence d'une littérature nationale canadienne-française. Selon Montigny, le vol littéraire au Canada des ouvrages français, pour lesquels on ne payait pas de royalties, "étouff[ait] dans le germe la littérature et les arts canadiens" en entravant l'accès de ces derniers au marché domestique. L'excellente étude par Meredith McGill offre un aperçu analogue très intéressant du même phénomène, en tant qu'il s'applique aux auteurs britanniques et américains (American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). La situation des écrivains canadiens-français fut cependant aggravée par l'isolation et l'envergure bien plus petite de leur marché. Plus important encore, le Canada était à l'époque un état quasi colonial en dépit de la création de la Dominion du Canada en 1867; les lois britanniques impériales régissant les affaires internationales au Canada -- l'adhésion à la Convention de Berne, par exemple-- étaient souvent en conflit avec les lois domestiques régissant, par exemple, la fabrication et la distribution des livres. De plus, le pouvoir législatif domestique demeurait carrément entre les mains des Canadiens-Anglais. Montigny procédait pour des raisons idéologiques, mais les problèmes qu'il abordait, et les résultats qu'il obtint, furent fortement influencés par les conditions financières du marché contemporain du livre.

Abstract

On March 23, 1906, the Superior Court of Quebec handed down a ruling in favour of Jules Mary, the French novelist and a member of the Société des gens de lettres de France. The decision halted the sale, in Canada, of unauthorized editions of Mary's 1893 novel Tante berceuse produced by Montreal reprint publisher Barthélémy Hubert and his Compagnie Générale de Réproduction Littéraire. The court challenge was the result of an extensive newspaper campaign conducted on two continents by Montreal's Louvigny de Montigny, of the Association des journalistes canadiens-français. Between 1903 and 1906, Montigny placed some forty-five articles in Canadian, French and Swiss periodicals, arguing for international authors' rights under the Bern Convention of 1886. Montigny also proposed the Canadian court challenge to his fellow writers in Paris, the Société des gens de lettres, who then successfully took up the crusade. Two questions come immediately to mind: if the Bern Convention, the international agreement on copyright of intellectual property, was signed by France, Great Britain, and its Commonwealth members, including Canada, in 1886, why was the Montreal court challenge necessary twenty years later? Secondly, what was the Canadian Montigny's interest in protecting the monetary rights of foreign authors?

This presentation will describe Montigny's brilliant public-relations campaign and explain the somewhat complicated triangle that describes the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century dynamic between international copyright law, unauthorized reprinting of literary and other works (often referred to as "piracy") and the emergence of a national literature. Montigny argued that the Canadian reprinting of French novels, for which no royalties were paid, hindered the publication of French-Canadian authors (as they were known before the coining of the term Québécois). Meredith McGill's excellent examination of this dynamic as it affected British and American authors (American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting 1834-1853. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) provides an interesting parallel view of the matter. French-Canadian authors faced additional challenges due to the isolation and relatively small size of their marketplace, and, more importantly, because of the conflict between British imperial legislation on international matters and Canadian legislation on domestic matters, at a time when Canada, a Dominion since 1867, was still a quasi-colonial state under the British Commonwealth, and domestic legislative power was in the hands of English Canadians. Montigny's motivation was primarily ideological, but the problem he sought to address and the result he would finally achieve were shaped by the financial pressures of manufacturing and trade.

Shelley S. Beal is a first-year doctoral candidate in French Literature and a Teaching Assistant at the University of Toronto, Canada, and enrolled for the second year in the graduate collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. This is her third year of close association with the Joseph Sablé Centre for Nineteenth Century French Studies, where she was a Research Assistant in 2002-3. The Émile Zola Archives held at the Centre, including 20,000 letters received by Zola, which remain for the most part unedited, have provided a strong foundation in correspondence editing and archival research. In her doctoral dissertation, "Building Cultural Bridges," Ms. Beal, a member of SHARP and various Émile Zola societies, will continue her investigation of the translators, agents and publishers who brought Zola's novels to North American readers. The relationship is an interesting one due to its period, 1878-1902, when great changes took place in American publishing and in matters of international copyright.

Bell (Maureen) and Hinks (John)

University of Birmingham

Book trade activity in English towns from 1700 to 1850 : comparative evidence from the British Book Trade Index.

The British Book Trade Index (BBTI), a database of people working in printing, bookselling and other book-related trades in England and Wales up to 1851, was founded in 1983 by the late Prof. Peter Isaac and has recently been transformed at the University of Birmingham into an interactive Web-based resource available to book historians and other researchers, thanks to project funding by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

The objectives of the three-year project include the evaluation of BBTI as a research resource and the first part of this evaluative research, recently completed, aims to identify the scale of book-trade activity between 1700 and 1850, using BBTI records to create a series of comparative ‘snapshots’, at 25-year intervals, of book-trade activity in a range of twenty-eight English provincial towns. The results, plotted against population trends, enable comparisons to be made between the scale and nature of book-trade activity in towns of different types and sizes. While many similarities may be identified, so too may a number of differences between towns resulting from a variety of socio-economic and other historical factors.The first part of this paper gives an overview of the ‘BBTI on the Web’ project, while the second part describes the urban book trade research, outlining the methodology, illustrating identified similarities and differences between towns, and examining key conclusions in greater detail. An important by-product of this research has been the identification of further research which would give a more detailed picture of English urban book-trade activity. The inherited structure of the original database necessitated methodological precautions when using BBTI as a quantitative research tool, which may have wider implications.

Dr Maureen Bell is Reader in English Literature in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham. She is currently working on A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700 and is director of the ‘British Book Trade Index on the Web' project.

Dr John Hinks, a former public library director, is now a Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, with responsibility for the research and editorial aspects of the ‘British Book Trade Index on the Web’ project.

The British Book Trade Index web-site may be found at www.bbti.bham.ac.uk

Bennett (Béatrice Mousli)

University of Southern California

Another bridge : magazines and translations / La traduction en revue : un nouveau pont jeté par-dessus l'Atlantique.

Abstract

There is an undeniable, yet indefinable bond joining French and American poetry. It can be seen in the ever increasing numbers of translations published in the two countries, which seem to outnumber works translated from other languages. It is also evident in the shapes and directions taken by the poetry of both nations, which have occasionally overlapped to the point of producing works that, by their very nature, are truly bi-national creations (see for example Michael Palmer’s translation of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Another Bridge : Magazines and Translations. Theory of Tables, itself, according to Hocquard, a "continuation" of his own translation of Palmer's "Baudelaire Series"). While the reasons for this mutual fascination may be difficult to identify, examples of it are not hard to come by - one need look no further than the pages of literary magazines, where excerpts from an ongoing Franco-American dialogue in poetry are readily apparent. For the past one hundred and fifty years, literary magazines have served as the telegraph/telephone/email connection for this dialogue, permitting, with relative speed and facility, the transmission of poetry from one people to the other. The ephemeral, periodic quality of the "little review" has provided a unique forum for the sustained exchange of ideas that continue to inform the writing of French and American poets up to the present day. With the advent of web-based publishing, the products of this exchange have been projected into another dimension, and endowed with a presence and immediacy that seem to erase the real time and space separating the two countries, thus moving their respective poetries even closer. So, examining the role of magazine editors, and also of the economy of magazines itself, I would like to present some of the aspect of this exchange and how it was made possible by the use of this specific media, the literary magazine.

Résumé

Il y a un lien indeniable, bien que difficile à définir entre les poésies américaines et françaises. On le voit au nombre sans cesse croissant de traductions publiées dans les deux pays, plus nombreuses que pour aucune autre langue. C'est aussi évident dans les orientations adoptée par les poésies des deux pays, qui ont été parfois si proches qu'elles ont finies par produire des créations véritablement bi-nationales, comme par exemple les traductions de Théories des Tables d'Emmanuel Hocquard par Michael Palmer, le travail d'Hocquard étant lui-même une « continuation » de sa propre traduction du recueil de Palmer Bauudelaire Series. Tandis que les raisons de cette fascination mutuelles sont parfois difficiles à identifier, les exemples abondent, surtout en revues.

Ces cent cinquante dernières années, les revues ont été le vecteur de la relation, permettant, avec une rapidité relative et une certaine flexibilité de transmettre la poésie d'un peuple à l'autre. Les qualités éphémères et périodiques de la revue ont procuré un forum unique pour cette conversation continue, cet échange d'idées , et ce jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Et avec les revues électroniques, l'échange a trouvé une nouvelle dimension, encore plus rapide et plus flexible, effaçant temps et surtout distance entre les deux pays, rapprochant les deux communautés. n examinant le rôle des éditeurs de revues, et l'économie même de la revue, je voudrais présenter quelques aspects de cet échange et comment il a été rendu possible par l'usage spécifique de la revue.

Béatrice Mousli Bennett received her doctorate from the University of Paris-IV Sorbonne in 1993. In 1996, she published her first book, Intentions, histoire d'une revue littéraire des années vingt, as well as a number of articles on literary magazines and contributed to the recently expanding field of history of publishing. In 1997, she edited the Correspondance : Adrienne Monnier et Henri et Hélène Hoppenot, for which she received the Stendhal grant from the Ministère français des Affaires Etrangères. But her main focus throughout these years has been the writer Valery Larbaud; she has edited critical editions of his works and has written a biography, Valery Larbaud (Flammarion), which in 1998 was awarded the Grand Prix de la Biographie de l'Académie Française. In 2001, she published a biographical essay on Virginia Woolf (Ed. du Rocher), exploring the writing path followed by the author of A Room of One's Own. She just completed a history of the Sagittaire (IMEC, 2003), a publishing house of the entre-deux-guerres, for which she was awarded a grant from the Centre National des Lettres in 1998.

With her husband Guy Bennett, she wrote Charting the Here of There : French & American Poetry in Translation in Literary Magazines, and they both have been appointed by the New York Public Library to curate in the fall of 2002 an exhibition companion to that volume, Reviews of Two Worlds; French and American Literary Periodicals, 1945-2002. In the spring of 2003, Charting the Here of There : A French and American Dialogue in Poetry, presented at the Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, expands by a century this exhibit, and is coupled with a Franco-American conference, to be held in April 2003.She is now working on a biography of the poet Max Jacob that will be published by Flammarion in 2004.

Bermès (Emmanuelle)

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Direction des services et des réseaux - Département de la bibliothèque numérique

L'estampe religieuse entre France et Espagne au 18e siècle : de l'objet commercial au vecteur culturel.

Résumé

L’exportation d’estampes françaises vers le monde hispanique est un phénomène constant à l’époque moderne. Ce sont surtout des pièces religieuses, de qualité médiocre, que les éditeurs d’estampes parisiens et lyonnais envoient par centaines à leur correspondants de la péninsule, suivant en cela l’exemple des libraires qui exploitaient eux aussi ce marché depuis le XVIe siècle. Au XVIIIe siècle, au lieu de se ralentir comme celle du livre, cette exportation se poursuit en s’appuyant sur une démarche commerciale désormais éprouvée : le type de pièces vendues, les itinéraires, et même les familles de commerçants spécialisées, sont stables depuis des décennies. Certaines de ces familles, comme les Poilly, sont d’un intérêt particulier, grâce à une documentation riche et précise les concernant, et à de nombreuses estampes retrouvées dans les bibliothèques françaises et espagnoles.

Les documents qui témoignent du commerce des images, ainsi que les images elles-mêmes, ont beaucoup à nous apprendre sur des usages de l’estampe qui sont, en réalité, proches des pratiques de lectures et indissociables du monde de l’écrit et du livre : usages religieux, certes, mais aussi bibliophiliques et même documentaires.

L’objet essentiel de nos préoccupations réside dans l’impact culturel de cette diffusion de l’estampe française. Les comportements religieux et la pensée spirituelle se reflètent dans la transmission, et parfois le détournement, des thèmes iconographiques que nous aborderons, tels que les représentations de la Vierge ou de la Passion du Christ. Nous suivrons les manifestations de cet imaginaire religieux, se diffusant vers l’Espagne, le Portugal, et au-delà, vers la Nouvelle Espagne, à travers l’action des ordres religieux et l’activité missionnaire.

Abstract

French prints exported to the hispanic world were numerous in the 18th century, since this lucrative business started two centuries before and was yet well developed. The prints that were sold, the routes they used to follow, as well as families of prints-sellers involved, are easy to study regarding this period. The Poilly family is a particularly interesting example.The abundant documentation around this activity, including the prints themselves, bring a great piece of information about the use of these prints. Religious or not, the prints’ use is always linked with the printed book.We mean to study the cultural impact of the diffusion of french prints, through some specific iconographic topics linked with religious communities and missionary activity, in Spain, Portugal and in the new world.

Doctorante de 3e année à l’ENS-LSH (dir. : Dominique de Courcelles), je poursuis les recherches entamées au cours de ma thèse d’Ecole nationale des chartes, soutenue en 2001. Diplômée de l’ENSSIB, je suis actuellement conservateur à la Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Bhowmik (Urmi)

Visiting Research Fellow, Sussex University

Multiple authorship in the early 18th-century periodical.

Recent work in the history of the book has chosen to concentrate on theories of multiple or collaborative authorship, as a corrective to the emphasis placed for so long on the figure of the solitary author as the sole progenitor of his work. This paper focuses on the periodical in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, which was, typically, the collective product of a number of authors, either working simultaneously (as in the Spectator, 1711-1712) or successively (the Examiner, 1710-1711). Although the writer's place in the hierarchy of text or book producers — which included stationers, printers, compositors, and booksellers — was unstable, eighteenth-century journals were "authored" in the sense that their content was legitimized by reference to the names of their writers. Multiple authorship made sense in the eighteenth-century literary marketplace by ensuring that a journal's success was not tied to one man's talent or enterprise. Employing a variety of writers diversified the journal's style and content, while coherence of matter or viewpoint was maintained by conventions such as the adoption of an editorial or authorial persona. Some journals formalized the condition of multiple authorship by pretending to be published by a club or association, reinforcing the commitment to collectivity and consensus-building required by the ideology of the public sphere. Emanating from a collective of writers enabled the periodical to identify itself with the voice of the community at large. Such an identification could be then be exploited for social and political ends. The conception of the periodical as multiply authored permitted the co-optation of readers themselves as co-authors. Material derived from readers' letters made up, in many cases, a substantial portion of the content of a periodical. Multiple authorship can, therefore, be understood not as a dispersal or a sharing of the burden of determining meaning, but as a shift in agency, from writers to readers. In order to enter the literary canon, however, the periodical needed to be identified with a proper name; hence "Addison's Spectator" or "Swift's Examiner." While recovering the practices and contexts of multiple authorship allows us to contest more effectively literary history's fixation on the single author, it is not in any way a "solution" to the problems involved in the understanding of authorship as the ownership of intellectual property. Many situations where collaborative authorship is encouraged, such as in the sciences, take for granted a system of intellectual labour as limiting and partial as the conception of creative genius.

Bidwell (John)

Pierpont Morgan Library

The publishing strategies of Pietro Andrea Mattioli, botanist and physician.

Abstract

Like emblem books, Renaissance herbals relied on a combination of image and text. They listed the names of plants, described their medical properties, and depicted their distinctive traits so that one could recognize them in the field or in other botanical publications. For the purpose of identification, woodcuts in printed books were far more reliable than pictures in manuscripts, which were often copied from dubious sources by artists who neglected or misconstrued important details. The first printed herbals contained purely notional illustrations derived from manuscripts, but some enterprising authors and publishers learned to exploit the full potential of printing technology to depict botanical specimens at lower cost, in larger quantities, and with greater accuracy. Otto Brunfels could claim that the woodcuts in his Herbarum vivae eicones (Stassburg, 1530) had been drawn from life, and Leonhart Fuchs showed how the woodcuts were prepared for his De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542) with portraits of the artists at work. Fuchs, Brunfels, and their publishers were experts at promoting the artistic and scientific merits of these expensive folio publications.

In the same spirit Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) built his reputation and his career on the success of his illustrated herbals. He started modestly with an Italian translation of Dioscorides’ De materia medica in 1544 but then issued larger and more ambitious editions with extensive commentaries combining textual scholarship with empirical research. His commentaries on Dioscorides went through as many as sixty editions in several languages. Drawing on the work of Sarton and others, Elizabeth Eisenstein notes that Mattioli was able to incorporate information he received from his readers in successive editions, appearing so frequently that they could be read like scientific periodicals.

Mattioli’s fame spread throughout Europe and as far as Prague, where he was appointed imperial physician. There, with financial assistance from patrons in court, he commissioned a new set of nearly six hundred large and elegant woodcuts for editions in Czech (1562) and German (1563), followed by an even more ambitious Latin edition (1565) issued by his business manager in Venice. These revised and enlarged editions of his herbal mark a highpoint in the history of botanical illustration. In this paper I will show how Mattioli used the printing medium to further his professional career, how he came to rely on illustration as a form of scientific communication, and how he employed it to validate his achievements and discourage his competition.

Résumé

On trouve dans les herbiers de la Renaissance, comme dans les livres d’emblèmes, l’association texte/image. Ces livres contiennent des listes de noms de plantes et décrivent leurs propriétés médicinales ainsi que leurs particularités afin de les identifier dans la nature comme dans les livres. Les bois gravés des livres imprimés de la Renaissance étaient plus utiles à l’identification d’un sujet que les images des manuscrits d’inspiration souvent douteuse fréquemment copiées par des artistes parfois négligeants qui déformaient des détails importants. Les images d’origine manuscrite de style purement imaginaire se trouvant dans les premiers herbiers furent remplacées par des illustrations d’une plus grande précision, produites à moindre coût, et à plus grand tirage par d’entreprenants auteurs, éditeurs et imprimeurs ayant réussi à exploiter pleinement les capacités de l’imprimerie. Otto Brunfels vanta ainsi les bois gravés de son Herbarum vivae eicones (Strasbourg, 1530) dessinés d’après nature ; Leonhart Fuchs illustra la façon dont les bois pour son De historia stirpium (Bâsle, 1542) avaient été préparés en représentant ses artistes au travail. Fuchs, Brunfels et leur éditeurs furent de talentueux promoteurs des qualités artistiques et scientifiques de ces coûteux in-folios.

De même, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) bâtit sa réputation et sa carrière sur le succès de ses herbiers illustrés. Il commença modestement par une traduction italienne de Dioscoride De Materia Medica en 1544 et publia ensuite des éditions de plus en plus ambitieuses accompagnées de commentaires alliant critique textuelle et recherche empirique. Son commentaire sur Dioscoride fut publié dans plus de soixante éditions, en plusieurs langues différentes et, comme l’a remarqué Elizabeth Eisenstein, entre autres d’après le travail de Sarton, Mattioli réussit à incorporer les commentaires de ses lecteurs tant la fréquence de nouvelles éditions était grande et permettait une lecture similaire à celle des périodiques scientifiques. En Europe, la réputation de Mattioli s’étendait jusqu’à Prague où il fut nommé Médecin Impérial. C’est dans cette ville que, avec le soutien financier du patronage de la cour, il entreprit d’exécuter un ensemble de près de 600 larges bois gravés pour des éditions tchèque (1562) et allemande (1563), suivies d’une très ambitieuse édition latine produite par son partenaire commercial à Venise. Ces différentes éditions marquent un moment important dans l’histoire de l’illustration botanique.

Dans cette communication, je montrerai comment Mattioli utilisa l’imprimerie pour faire la promotion de ses ouvrages, comment il réussit à utiliser l’illustration en tant que forme de communication scientifique et enfin comment les gravures lui permirent d’assurer son succès et d’éliminer ses concurrents.

John Bidwell is Astor Curator of Printed Books and Binding at The Pierpont Morgan Library and is Chair of the Publications Committee of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Borghi (Maurizio)

Bocconi University of Milan, Italy

Settling the boundaries. The circulation of the Book in the privilege system / La circulation du livre dans le système des privilèges d'imprimerie.

Abstract

The book-privileges are frequently seen as mere forerunners of the current intellectual property rights, i.e. as “less perfect” juridical instruments compared with the succeeding copyrights and literary property laws. From this point of view, the history of the book-trade’s law-systems appears as an unbroken line, going from the privileges of the ancien régime to the current IPRs. The paper is based, on the contrary, on the assumption that a real “paradigm change” took place in the European legal history in the second half of the 18th century. In that sense, the book-privilege and the intellectual property rights are not simply two juridical institutions, historically succeeded one to the other, but, more properly, two different systems, i.e. two alternative ways of instituting the work of the mind as an exchangeable good.

The paper tries to unfold some of the main characteristics of the ancient privilege-system, with particular regard to the relationship between the ratio of granting privileges and the structure of the book-market place. On one hand, the ancien régime’s book market place is rather a plurality of market-places, i.e. a group of circuits operating independently one from the other, each of them with its own rules and purposes, with no common denominator. On the other hand, the privilege-system is an efficient method for establishing the exchangeability of the book-commodity as a function of the market in which this commodity is exchanged. As results, the book’s exchange value, which the privilege creates with an institutional act, remains determined and defined not just within tempo-spatial borders, but also within specific economic boundaries.

The discussion of these topics will be carried out by presenting a specific case study, namely the State of Milan’s privilege-system of the 16th-18th centuries.

Maurizio Borghi is Research assistant of Economic History at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). He has recently published a book on the genesis of the author’s rights in Italy. He has then launched, in collaboration with a group of economic history and law scholars, a research program on intellectual property rights in historical perspective (“Old and New Boundaries of IPRs”), whose first issues was presented at the last symposium of the Society for Critical Exchange (Chicago, 9 November 2003, M/MLA Annual Conference).

Résumé

Les privilèges d’imprimerie sont couramment considérées tout simplement comme des précurseurs des actuels droits de propriété intellectuelle, c’est à dire comme des instruments juridiques « moins parfaits » par rapport aux « plus évolues » lois du copyright et de la propriété littéraire. De ce point de vue, l’histoire des systèmes juridiques qui réglementent le marché du livre – ainsi que les rapports auxquels ce dernier donne lieu – apparaît comme une espèce de ligne droite qui mène, sans solution de continuité, des privilèges d’ancien régime jusqu’aux droits d’auteur d’aujourd’hui. L’hypothèse sur laquelle cette relation est fondée est tout autre, et notamment que dans l’histoire européenne du droit a lieu, dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIème siècle, un vrai bouleversement, et plus précisément un « changement de paradigme » par rapport à la façon dont l’« oeuvre de l’esprit » est envisagée. Dans ce sens, les privilèges et les droits de propriété intellectuelle ne sont pas simplement deux étapes de la même histoire, mais plutôt deux systèmes, c’est à dire deux façons différentes d’établir l’oeuvre de l’esprit en tant que «marchandise» échangeable.

Cette relation est une tentative d’élucider les principale caractéristiques de l’ancien système des privilèges, eu égard à la relation entre la forme des privilèges et la structure du marché dans lesquels les privilèges intervenaient. D’une côté, le marché du livre de l’ancien régime est plutôt une pluralité de marchés, c’est à dire un ensemble de « circuits », chacun avec ses règles et ses finalités, indépendant l’une de l’autre et sans commune dénominateur. D’autre côté, le système des privilèges est – dans cette situation – un instrument tout à fait rationnel et efficace pour établir l’échangeabilité de la marchandise-livre en fonction du marché dans lequel cette marchandise est échangée. Par conséquent, la « valeur d’échange» du livre – valeur crée par le privilège en tant que acte institutionnel libre – est maintenue constamment entre des limites ou des bornes qui ne sont pas seulement spatio-temporels, mais aussi spécifiquement économiques.

La discussion de ces points est conduite en suivant l’exposition d’un case study particulier, notamment le système de privilèges d’imprimerie de l’Etat de Milan dans les XVI-XVIIIème siècles.

Maurizio Borghi est assistant de recherche à l’Institut d’histoire économique de l’Université « Luigi Bocconi » de Milan. Il a récemment publié un essai sur l’histoire du droit d’auteur en Italie. En collaboration avec un group d’historiens de l’économie et de juristes, il a lancé un projet de recherche sur la propriété intellectuelle en perspective historique (intitulé Old and New Boundaries of IPRs [Anciennes et nouvelles frontières des droits de propriété intellectuelle]), dont les premières résultats ont été présentées en occasion du colloque de la Society for Critical Exchange (Chicago, 9 novembre 2003).

Bouju (Marie-Cécile)

Centre de recherche d’histoire quantitative (CNRS), Caen

Le livre comme arme internationale de propagande : le cas des relations entre le Service d'édition de l'internationale communiste et la France (1920-1939).

Lieu de coordination politique et outil de défense de la jeune Union soviétique, l’Internationale communiste (dite Troisième Internationale ou Komintern) est une organisation complexe à l’histoire agitée. Elle a consacré une part non négligeable de son activité à la propagande politique, d’abord par la presse et le livre, avec pour ambition de diffuser l’idéologie marxiste-léniniste et la révolution dans le monde entier.

Les archives du RGASPI (Archives d’état en histoire socio-politique) à Moscou permettent de découvrir l’ampleur de cette activité.

Le Service d’Editions de l’Internationale communiste voit le jour dès 1919 à Saint-Pétersbourg, et connaît une histoire relativement stable jusqu’aux grands procès de la fin des années trente. Sous l’autorité de la direction du Komintern, il est chargé d’établir ce qu’on appelle des plans d’éditions, c’est-à-dire des programmes éditoriaux, pour les partis communistes du monde entier et d’en contrôler l’exécution. De même, il doit s’assurer de la bonne diffusion de ces ouvrages dans ces pays.

Dès l’origine, ces plans d’édition symbolisent l’opposition entre une culture politique communiste unique, marxiste-léniniste, définie à Moscou, et les traditions politiques et littéraires différentes des pays visés par cette propagande. Il faut attendre 1934, en raison de la montée des périls en Europe et notamment l’accession au pouvoir d’Hitler en Allemagne, pour que l’Internationale admette comme légitime l’existence d’une tradition intellectuelle propre à ces pays et donc leur reconnaisse une certaine autonomie éditoriale. Le cas de la France est très révélateur de ces conflits et de ce revirement.

Par ailleurs, l’Internationale communiste n’est pas le seul organisme habilité à diffuser la littérature soviétique au sens large. La VOKS (Société panrusse pour les relations culturelles avec l’étranger) ou les organisations littéraires soviétiques se chargent de diffuser notamment la nouvelle littérature soviétique, placée sous le signe du réalisme socialiste. Or, l’analyse de la situation française montre que le Parti communiste français n’est pas l’éditeur prioritaire aux yeux des autorités soviétiques ou mêmes du Komintern, mais plutôt les éditeurs ayant pignon sur rue (Gallimard, Rieder,…).

Situation professionnelle : chargée de recherche au CNRS (Centre de recherche d’histoire quantitative, Caen). Titres universitaires : Diplômée d’études approfondies (université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en Yvelines) ; archiviste-paléographe (Ecole nationale des Chartes) ; diplôme de conservateur des bibliothèques (ENSSIB) Travaux de recherche : histoire de l’édition française au xxe siècle. Je prépare une thèse de doctorat d’histoire sur les maisons d’édition du Parti communiste français (1920-1956), sous la direction de Marc Lazar, à l’Institut d’études politiques à Paris.

Bromage (Sarah)

Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records (SAPPHIRE) Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh

Voices from the papermills.

This paper discusses a new SAPPHIRE initiative 'Papermaking on the Water of Leith', this project is the first sustained and focused attempt to record the social history of the Scottish papermaking industry. Until the mid twentieth century the Water of Leith was an important industrial centre for Edinburgh, particularly in papermaking. At the height of industrial production there were 76 mills at work along this 24 mile stretch of river; many of these were papermills undertaking a range of production activities. Although the industry has now disappeared from the river, there was still an opportunity to record the life histories of those who lived and worked along the Water of Leith.

'Papermaking on the Water of Leith' undertook to record the oral testimonies of former employees from various mills and work roles within the papermaking industry. The main themes that emerged from the research are discussed and this paper will focus on work in the mills, technological change and innovations in the industry, range of paper and paper products, impact and shape on the communities along the Water of Leith and the demise of the industry. It will look at the workers employed in the industry, their roles, jobs, employment conditions; relations between workers and managers; training; social organisation; welfare provision and facilities; role and impact of the unions and hours of work.

This paper explores the history and methodology of this oral history project, its main areas of interest and collecting policy. 'Papermaking on the Water of Leith' aims to increase study, understanding and enjoyment of the heritage and history of an industry which had been a major employer in the Edinburgh region and nationally throughout Scotland and which played an important role in underpinning the social, cultural and intellectual development of Scotland and other countries which utilised the paper products. In particular its primary aim was to initiate and establish an oral and social history archive and database relating to the economic, social and cultural history of the Scottish papermaking industry in the twentieth century. A secondary aim was to collect print, visual and ephemeral material likely to enhance the archival collection based at the Edward Clark Collection, Napier University, Edinburgh. Outcomes of this research will be examined including the use of oral history material as the basis of exhibition material, publications and learning resource packs for schools.

Bruyère (Claire)

Université Paris VII

Dissolving boundaries : changing roles and book banning in U.S. schools / Effacement des frontières : valse des rôles dans l'interdiction de livres pour la jeunesse aux Etats-Unis.

Abstract

Rather than focusing on the author(s) – agent - editor/packager relationship, this paper will examine what happens to certain books published in the U.S. today, comparing the current situation to that existing in France. At issue are books selected by teachers for students (up to college freshmen) to be read for practice, for study, for exams, or for leisure. This discussion stems from the surprising finding that certain tendencies and practices that had been thought out of date are in fact pursued with renewed vigor. The number of cases under litigation and of protests by civil liberties associations has increased. The goals of this paper are:

– To determine who wields or seizes the power to do this. By comparison with France, for reasons that include the Federal system, the absence of centralization, the sources of funding, the frequency of lawsuits, and the increasing influence exerted by parents, there are many more decision levels in the U.S .

– To consider what light the phenomenon throws on U.S. society today. Are the fears that motivate these attempts at censorship changing? For some, yes, and often not the same ones as in France. Yet, as in France, groups at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum combine their weight to "protect children".

– To study the effects of this censorship on what books are available, therefore how it affects publishers and the book market. The threats of book banning or active protest are real and exercise a "chilling effect". The freedom of teachers, school administrators and librarians is restricted, and publishers and distributors are sensitive to the financial risks. This results in a reduction of the diversity of approaches, forms of expression, and opinions, at the very moment when multiculturalism seems preeminent.

This field of observation is all the more interesting as it does not seem to be directly related to the political climate. The problem, of course, extends to the Internet and has produced Federal laws, themselves challenged in court, but the same underlying fear of words is at work. Some lobbies have acquired unprecedented power to influence education in accordance with their fears of science, of evil, or simply of difference. An already impressive bibliography bears witness to the questions raised by this trend. We may have here a microcosm of contemporary society, in which boundaries are actually replaced by fences. (see N. Klein's Fences and Windows).

Résumé

Étude qui se place non au stade de la relation auteur(s)–agent- éditeur/packager, mais en aval, et porte sur les États-Unis à l'époque contemporaine, mais avec la France à titre de comparaison. Il s'agit des livres proposés à la lecture d'élèves de tous niveaux à fin d'apprentissage, d'étude, d'examen, de loisir. Réflexion issue de la surprise de voir certaines tentations et pratiques que l'on croirait dépassées se poursuivre et s'intensifier et du nombre de cas débattus en justice ou dans les organisations de défense des libertés. Objet de la communication?

– Déterminer qui a ou prend ce pouvoir. Les échelons décisionnels sont démultipliés par rapport à la France, en raison notamment du système fédéral, de la non centralisation, des sources de financement, du recours fréquent aux tribunaux, et du pouvoir croissant pris par les parents.

– Observer le phénomène comme révélateur social. Les peurs qui motivent ces efforts de censure changent-elles? Pour certaines, oui, et ce ne sont souvent pas les mêmes qu'en France. Mais, comme en France à certains moments, des groupes idéologiquement opposés s'allient pour "protéger" les jeunes.

– Étudier les conséquences de ce phénomène sur l'offre de lecture, et, en amont, sur l'édition et le marché (littérature générale, manuels scolaires). Les dangers d'interdiction ou de protestation, bien réels, ont un "chilling effect". Enseignants, responsables de l'administration scolaire et bibliothécaires sont sur la défensive, et le risque de pertes financières affecte éditeurs et distributeurs. Des livres sont caviardés ou retirés ; certains manuscrits ne sont pas publiés ou même rédigés. On aboutit à une restriction, non du nombre de livres, mais de la diversité des approches, des langages, des opinions, au moment même où le multiculturalisme semble régner.

Ce champ d'observation est d'autant plus intéressant qu'il ne semble pas directement lié à l'actualité politique. Le problème s'étend évidemment à l'Internet, objet de lois fédérales, elles-mêmes mises en cause, mais la même peur des mots est à l'œuvre. Les groupes de pression appartiennent à la tradition américaine, mais certains ont acquis un pouvoir inégalé, mis au service de la peur de la science, de la peur du Mal, ou simplement de la peur de la différence. Une importante bibliographie récente témoigne des interrogations sur cette évolution. N'y aurait-il pas là un microcosme de la société actuelle ? les frontières y sont souvent remplacées par des barrières ("fences", cf. Naomi Klein Fences and Windows).