Piracy in the Book Trade

One reason the period of the European Enlightenment has so often been touted as originating the era of modernity in the West is that it was an age of avid reading and writing. To understand what made all that activity possible is, therefore, no idle task. In fact, culture was articulated, circulated, tested, and confirmed by means of a trade in printed books, and that trade was at once artisanal, traditional, entrepreneurial, and volatile. For four decades now, Robert Darnton has been by far the most important historian to reveal the complex byways of this trade and to show how completely the course of intellectual and cultural history depended on the labors of its practitioners. In some ways, it is still possible to see in the culture he has revealed the foundations of a modern sensibility; but in others it now seems starkly distinct to its own time and place. Moreover, because Darnton cares deeply about the particularities of everyday life, respecting complexity rather than reducing experiences to “cases” in the service of some imposed schema, his books succeed as feats of scholarly sympathy as well as analysis. They capture that combination of familiarity and difference in which so much of the fascination of historical exploration lies. Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment is no exception.