Simon Burrows and Mark Curran are pleased to announce the on-line publication of the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe database at:
A major resource for bibliographical, historical and literary scholarship, it is now made freely available to academics and the wider public.
The database, funded by a £355,485 grant from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, tracks the dissemination of over 400,000 copies of almost 4,000 editions of 3,600 works around Europe by a celebrated Swiss publisher-bookseller, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), in the period 1769-1794.
The database allows users to explore the STN’s supply and distribution networks across time and space, on both a macro and a micro level. They can investigate the dissemination of single works or the trade of individual clients; the STN’s client networks; the distribution patterns for all works, or those by a particular author or on particular themes. Specialist tools allow for geographic mapping; the graphing of trends over time; or the creation of local and regional best-sellers tables. Advanced query options make it possible to make specialised searches by, among other things, legal or illegal sectors; gender or clients; or place of publication.
Using a state-of-the-art intuitive user interface, the database is also accompanied by written guides and instructional videos.
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‘This is a fantastically rich research tool, bringing up an astonishing amount of detailed information across the whole range of late eighteenth-century print culture. It will surely become established as a valuable point of reference for just about everyone with an interest in the period, and it is hard to think of a more signal service which might be made to current eighteenth-century scholarship relating to France.’
- Simon MacDonald, University College London
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