Mapping the Trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, 1769-1794
University of Western Sydney
Project leaders: Prof. Simon Burrows, Mark Curran
This project uses database technology to map the French book trade across late-Enlightenment Europe, between 1769 and 1794. It charts best-selling texts and authors; reading tastes across Europe; changing patterns of demand over time; and networks of exchange in the print-trade. The project tracks the movement of around 400,000 copies of 4,000 books across Europe. It details, where possible, the exact editions of these works, the routes by which they travelled and the locations of the clients that bought or sold them. As French was the international language of the period, widely read by Europe’s elites, these books include many of the most significant publications of the period. As such, we hope that the resource will be of interest not only to specialists in book history or French history or literature, but to anybody with an interest in the dissemination of ideas in the European Enlightenment. To achieve these goals, the project uses the richest available representative source, the business records of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794. The STN archive, held at the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Neuchâtel (BPUN), is a unique resource for studying the late eighteenth-century French language book trade. No comparable archives are known to survive for the period.
Because the STN traded from outside France, it was able to deal in all genres of book, including illegal and pirate editions banned inside the kingdom. The STN boasted clients in cities all over Europe, including major booksellers and publishers in Dublin, London, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid, Warsaw, Naples, as well as the German and French-speaking countries. This makes it possible to use the STN archives as the basis for international comparisons of reading tastes during the late Enlightenment.
