Literary Tour de France. The world of books on the eve of the French Revolution

On July 5, 1778, the Swiss Jean-Franesu Favarzhe-trading representative of the typographic society of the Neugator-Siel on a horse and went on a five-month journey through France, stopping on almost every bookstore on his way and constituting a kind of dumping on the nicknames. The story of his journey could compose the plot of the romance of the Plutovsky novel, but was in the hands of the American scientist Robert Darnton-i formed the basis of a large study on the formation of a book market in France of the 18th century. Using the trial of Cohabage as a story canvas, Darnton tells in detail how the book business functioned in practice, how literary texts came to French readers, how semi -legal trade in reprinted or super -supported books in the pre -revolutionary years. The author pays particular attention to the variegated variety of people who inhabited this world of books: censors, printers, bookseller all stripes (from capital members of guilds to stray books), owners of small shops, illegal private entrepreneurs, etc. All of them played an extremely significant role in the distribution of books, but the history of literature completely forgot about them, and all of them sunk into oblivion without a trace. One of the tasks of this book, according to the author, is to restore historical justice and return them to life. Robert Darnton-Revolutionary Professor of Princeton University, professor and director of the library of Harvard University, a specialist in the history of France of the XVIII century, author of the books" Mesterism and the end of the Enlightenment "era," Poetry and the police. The network of communications in Paris of the 18th century "," Great cat Battle and other episodes from the history of French culture "," Censors at work. How the state forms literature.