A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few beca...

”A major achievement of American scholarship and in the first rank of those which have been transforming our view of French history during the last twenty years.“ —New York Review of BooksA great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Robert Darnton’s history of the Encyclopédie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he trac...

In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the "Fertile Crescent" — countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland — pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of "copyright" very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged — tacitly or openly — that these pirated editions of...

Influential writings make the case for open access to research, explore its implications, and document the early struggles and successes of the open access movement.Peter Suber has been a leading advocate for open access since 2001 and has worked full time on issues of open access since 2003. As a professor of philosophy during the early days of the internet, he realized its power and potential as a medium for scholarship. As he writes now, “it was like an asteroid...

While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is almost completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Bohémiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half dozen copies are available in libraries t...

“We are given a vivid sense of how songs were circulated and performed on the streets of Paris…Darnton has opened up another rich vein of research in the eighteenth century.” —Times Literary SupplementIn spring 1749, François Bonis, a medical student in Paris, found himself unexpectedly hauled off to the Bastille for distributing an “abominable poem about the king.” So began the Affair of the Fourteen, a police crackdown on ordinary citizens for unauthoriz...

The publishing industry in France in the years before the Revolution was a lively and sometimes rough-and-tumble affair, as publishers and printers scrambled to deal with (and if possible evade) shifting censorship laws and tax regulations, in order to cater to a reading public's appetite for books of all kinds, from the famous Encyclopédie, repository of reason and knowledge, to scandal-mongering libel and pornography. Historian and librarian Robert Darnton uses his exclusive acc...

**A Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Book of the Year‘Robert Darnton is one of the world’s greatest historians, and this is an exceptional book: a huge social and cultural portrait of Paris in the build-up to the French Revolution’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year**When a Parisian crowd stormed the Bastille in July 1789, it triggered an event of global consequence: the overthrow of the monarchy and ...

**The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.“Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist.” —New Republic**When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously ...

A classic work of anthropology that offers a groundbreaking exploration of what culture isNamed one of the 100 most important books published since World War II by the Times Literary Supplement“As an anthropologist, philosopher, political scientist, literary critic, and all-around, all-star intellectual, Clifford Geertz helped a vast public make sense of the human condition.” —Robert Darnton, New York R...

The invention of writing was one of the most important technological, cultural, and sociological breakthroughs in human history. With the printed book, information and ideas could disseminate more widely and effectively than ever before -- and in some cases, affect and redirect the sway of history. Today, nearly one million books are published each year. But is the era of the book as we know it -- a codex of bound pages -- coming to an end? And if it is, should we celebrate its demise and ...

While the marquis de Sade was drafting The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, another libertine marquis in a nearby cell was also writing a novel—one equally outrageous, full of sex and slander, and more revealing for what it had to say about the conditions of writers and writing itself. Yet Sade's neighbor, the marquis de Pelleport, is almost completely unknown today, and his novel, Les Bohémiens, has nearly vanished. Only a half dozen copies are available in libraries t...