The privilege system that emerged during the century that followed the invention of the printed book in Europe rapidly became a vital part of the economics of the national and international book trade. A monopoly conceded by the Crown, a state, or religious or local authorities, it theoretically enabled its holder to publish and sell a text without fearing competition. These two volumes published by Classiques Garnier look to shed light on the manner in which the system functioned. The first volume, Privilèges de librairie en France et en Europe, is a series of contributions from scholars in the field of literary studies and book history on various aspects of privileges in both a French and a wider European context as they were presented to a seminar organized by the editor of the volume, Edwidge Keller-Rahbé, in Lyon between 2009 and 2013, alongside some additional contributions.
The volume is structured in two parts. The first is devoted to the French world and regroups a series of articles that explore different aspects of the privileges, mainly as they were printed in the editions to which they referred. They are also mostly interested in the content of the books published, mainly to understand the relationship between the privilege and the intellectual creator(s). Jean-Dominique Mellot examines the manner in which periodicals were integrated into the system in the seventeenth century to ensure royal control over the spread of information, underlining that the rules were applied with a degree of pragmatism. Marthe Paquant, whose essay opens the volume, investigates the lexicographic origins of the word privilege through the entries devoted to the word in dictionaries from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Her analysis is mainly interested in the place of the author rather than the relationship between book privileges and wider—and more habitual—uses of the word in the legal world. Similarly, Laurent Pfister's analysis of how a privilege was obtained is dominated by authors and features a discussion of the relationship between privilege and intellectual property.
This angle is confirmed by a section on references to book privileges in the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors. Alain Riffaud's analysis of privileges printed in theatrical editions, Marie-Christine Pioffet's examination of facetious privileges, Jean Leclerc's selection of four privileges delivered for burlesque poetry, and Éliane Itti's article on those received for Madame Dacier's works all concentrate on the question of the importance—perceived or real—of these legal texts to authors and how they could use them in their writings and careers. A second series concentrates on privilege and visual considerations. Henriette Pommier investigates the relationship between engravers and privileges; Daniel Régnier-Roux considers architectural books; and Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa examines the question of the presentation of the privilege by looking at how the type used sought to imitate an epigraphic style in seven editions.
The contrast with the second part of the first volume is manifest. Here, there is a systematic geographic overview of the manner in which privileges functioned in different parts of Europe. Rather than put the author to the fore—or even a given type of work—these contributions seek to give an overall understanding of the phenomenon in a manner mostly absent in the first part. The authors who have written these essays are in the main well-established figures in the world of book history. Thus the ever erudite Jean-François Gilmont writes about Geneva in the sixteenth century and how the city authorities came to terms with the spectacular rise in production after the arrival of such luminaries as Robert I. Estienne. Paul Hoftijzer presents the commercially vibrant world of the Low Countries, concentrating for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the newly formed United Provinces. Ian Maclean, an expert of scholarly printing, deals with dexterity with the difficult and multifaceted nature of privileges in the religiously diverse and politically fragmented Holy Roman Empire. Angela Nuovo uses her extensive knowledge of the Italian book market to present the case of the birth and development of Venetian privileges in the sixteenth century. Jane C. Ginsburg seeks to understand Rome's attitude to such requests in the sixteenth century by analyzing a corpus of over five hundred documents in the Vatican's archives. María Luisa López-Vidriero Abelló chronicles the stages in the evolving Spanish Crown's attitude toward privileges in the complex context of a composite monarchy. John Feather deals with the specificity of an English book world regimented by the presence of the Stationers’ Company and the question of the author's rights during the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
These concise but wide-ranging and assured contributions answer fundamental questions, such as how such documents were obtained, and what their validity was, and attempt to sketch out a quantitative approach to the phenomenon. What emerges from these essays is a sense of a system that, while it shared a similar founding concept, was adapted to the local requirements of each area to fit in with the idiosyncratic nature of each legal system and to respect preexisting political circumstances. The volume concludes with a postface by Nicolas Schapira that turns back to the French sphere and seeks to define the privilege's position as mainly, in his view, between the king and the author.
In the accompanying volume, Edwidge Keller-Rahbé is joined by the scholar of the French literary Renaissance Michèle Clément in presenting an anthology of original texts based around these privileges. The compendium is limited to a subsection of the privileges conceded by French authorities: those given to authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Each case is presented with an initial analytical section; then follows the full text as it was printed; finally, there is a commentary with a very succinct bibliography. This anthology of one hundred privileges obviously involved what must have been difficult choices. The editors have, for instance, chosen approximately half from each century, despite the statistical dominance of the seventeenth century (and the fact the last entry is dated 1715).
Much more problematic, however, is the quality of the bibliographical data given. The editions are not identified in any of the standard bibliographies—Baudrier, Renouard, or the Universal Short Title Catalogue, for example. The position of the privilege in the volume is given in a bewildering fashion, virtually never with a reference to the signatures, but instead with indications such as “à l'avant-dernier feuillet, avant la table” (“on the last but one leaf, before the table” [129]) or “à la fin sur trois pages n. p.” (“at the end on three unpaginated pages” [324]), as if the authors were not aware that in different copies these elements could have been bound in different places. The lack of bibliographic knowledge is underlined with formats described as “12 p. par cahier” (“12 pages per gathering” [138]) or “2 tomes en 1 vol. in-16” (“2 tomes in 1 vol. in-16”), as if the manner the book was bound affected its format. There is no fingerprinting, and neither the type nor the ornate letters are described with reference to existing dictionaries (no references to Vervliet or to the efforts of BaTyR), with instead entries such as “grande capitale à l'initiale” (“large initial capital letter” [242]). There is also a complete absence of consistency between entries for the section on literary genre, which ranges from the very general to the very specific. It is a shame that greater bibliographic knowledge and rigor were not brought to bear on the project.
As a whole the two volumes still represent a valuable contribution to the field of authors’ privileges, though with clear limitations. The bias toward a literary approach of the subject for the French material is somewhat frustrating when compared with the quality and scope of the international contributions. The lack of bibliographic knowledge and wider understanding of the book world is also problematic. There is little attempt to understand the evolution of privileges because of economic, religious, or political circumstances. The publishers are, in this respect, the elephant in the room. They obtained the crushing majority of privileges bestowed in France—perhaps it is time that their role and influence were more fully recognized.
