Early Modern Publishers

Identities and Strategies in the Book Trade
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72715-1
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 138, 592 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 1193 g

Reihe: Library of the Written Word / Library of the Written Word - The Handpress World

Publishers play an indisputably important part in book history, but cover such wide areas of activity that they are rarely given a formal definition. This volume seeks to place the publisher at the heart of the early modern book trade. It examines their identities and careers, the business strategies they adopted for survival, their involvement in the professional, religious, political, and economic conditions in which they found themselves, and the constraints under which they had to operate.

By presenting more than twenty case studies on individual and groups of publishers active in Sweden, Prussia, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Ireland, Germany and the Low Countries, this volume makes a major contribution to the study of an elusive but essential figure in the history of the early modern book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cullen, Barnaby

Maclean, Ian

der Weduwen, Arthur

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures and Tables

Notes on Contributors

1 Introduction: Early Modern Publishers Ian Maclean

Part 1: Authors, Translators, Patrons and Institutions as Publishers

2 King, Bishop, Professor and Postmaster: The Early Modern Swedish Publisher Arthur der Weduwen and Barnaby Cullen

3 Olaus Magnus as Publisher: An Exiled Swedish Archbishop in Rome Vigdis Andrea Baugstø Evang

4 Strategies of Paratexts: Polish-Speaking Königsberg Publishers (c.1540–1575) Communicating with Their Readers Wojciech Kordyzon

5 An Institutional Collective Publisher? Geneva’s Company of Pastors Exploiting Printing (c.1620–c.1685) Hadrien Dami

6 Publishing Books by Subscription: The Contribution to Its Development by Authors, the Universities and Booksellers in Seventeenth-Century England John A. Sibbald

Part 2: Publishers and Commercial Strategies

7 Publishing an Early Modern Best Seller: Jean du Pre´ and the French Vitae patrum (1486–1487) Matteo Colombo

8 Necessary and Useful Things: Hernando Colón, the Bindoni Family and the Production of Popular Books in Sixteenth-Century Venice Natale Vacalebre

Part 3: Confessional Identities, Economic Considerations

9 ‘Blawius paratissimus est excudere Niciana omnia’ Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca and the Collaborative Navigation of the Interconfessional Early Modern Book Trade Jennifer K. Nelson

10 ‘Popish Books and Popish Knacks’: The Evolving Publishing Career of James Thompson, 1650–1678 Chelsea Reutcke

11 For Economic Profit or the Jansenist Cause? How Eugène-Henri Fricx and Arnauld de Brigode Managed Their Publishing Roles during the Jansenist Controversy (1680–1703) Dieter Cammaerts

12 The Protestant Merchants Who Kept Catholic Publishing Alive: Publishing and Distribution Strategy at the Officina Plantiniana Elise Watson

13 ‘I Am Not Afraid—I Have a Printing Press at My Disposal’: Aspects of Hebrew Printing and Publishing in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam Heide Warncke

Part 4: Political Identities, Economic Considerations

14 Thomas Basset, Publisher of Locke and Hobbes: A Life and Death on Fleet Street Geoff Kemp

15 Champions of ‘The Great English Third Estate’? The Evolving Output of English Trade Publishers, 1680–1700 Basil Bowdler

16 Politics behind Publishing: The Publication of French Revolutionary Books for the Dublin Market, 1789–1794 Maria Zukovs

Part 5: Rivalries and Controversy

17 A Bitter Rivalry: Parrino, Bulifon and the Race to Publish a History of Naples Laura Incollingo

18 Johann Hermann Widerhold (1635–1683), International Publishing Rivalries and the Limits of the Genevan Book Trade in the Late Seventeenth Century Zachary Brookman

19 Negotiating Practice and Identity through Nachdruck: Publishers and Unauthorised Print in the German Print World (1765–1835) Isabelle Riepe

Part 6: Profiles of the English Publisher, 1580–1750

20 The Poor versus the Patents: Contextualising John Danter’s Reputation through the Lens of the Patent-Less Poor Michelle Michel

21 Behold, a White Horse in St Paul’s Churchyard: Arthur Johnson and the Distribution of Literature in Early Seventeenth-Century London Andreas P. Bassett

22 Women Stationers at the Temple Uncovering the Presence of Women in the Book Trade at the Honourable Societies of the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple Barnaby Bryan and Renae Satterley

23 The English Provincial Publisher, 1695–1750: Beyond the Local Newspaper James McCall

Afterword: O, Where Are the Early Modern Publishers for Today? Jeff Jarvis

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Barnaby Cullen, PhD (2024, University of St Andrews) is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant with the COMLAWEU project at the University of St Andrews. He specialises in the history of print and politics of early modern Scandinavia and the Baltic.

Ian Maclean FBA holds Emeritus and Honorary Professorships at Oxford and St Andrews. His most recent publications are Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book (Brill, 2020) and [ed. with Dmitri Levitin] Classical Reception in Early Modern Europe: Comparative Perspectives (Brill, 2021).

Arthur der Weduwen is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director and Project Manager of the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC). He specialises in the history of communication, printing and the book trade, early modern politics, and the history of the Netherlands. He is the author or editor of a dozen books in these fields.