Introduction
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project uses database technology to map the trade of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a celebrated Swiss publishing house that operated between 1769 and 1794.
As the STN sold the works of other publishers alongside its own editions, their archives can be considered a representative source for studying the history of the book trade and dissemination of ideas in the late Enlightenment.
Using state of the art database, web interface and GIS technology, the project will provide a user-friendly resource for use by scholars, teachers and students of French literature and history, book history, the Enlightenment and bibliography more generally.
This resource will be publically launched in May 2012 and will be freely available on this website.
Click on the links to the left to browse further information, or go to the Site Map to find a particular page directly.
The project is supported by a four-year grant of £355,485 from the British Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded to Professor Simon Burrows (University of Leeds). It was conceived by Simon Burrows and Dr. Mark Curran as the first phase of wider initiative, which will electronically map various other aspects of the book trade across eighteenth-century Europe and beyond.
As the database structure is ideally constituted for other studies of the production, distribution and dissemination and reception of printed works, there are plans for adapting it for use by other scholars as a platform and portal for further work on the book trade. For latest information on the project and future plans to develop the database into a platform for other researchers, consult the project blog at: frenchbooktrade.wordpress.com.