A Literary Tour de France
Robert Darnton has launched an open-access website devoted to the world of books in eighteenth-century France. The site functions as an electronic book, bringing together a large selection of essays, documents, maps, and illustrations. Among the items available: five hundred secret police reports on authors, letters exchanged by publishers and booksellers, inside accounts of the pirating industry, the diary of a traveling sales rep, and the correspondence of smugglers, along with background essays on every aspect of publishing and the book trade. In showing how books reached readers, the website reveals the extent of their penetration into the social order. It contains best-seller lists, studies of the operations of the book market, and a general analysis of the demand for literature on the eve of the French Revolution. It also makes available a selection of Robert Darnton’s previous writing on the history of books and cultural history.
For more information, visit robertdarnton.org.
A Literary Tour de France,