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04A - German Publishing in the Twentieth Century
McCleery, Alistair,
Tauchnitz and Albatross: English-language Publishing Under the Third Reich
What happens to foreign-language publishers under a totalitarian regime? The centrality of Germany in European publishing, and specifically the city of Leipzig, led to the establishment of English-language publishers based there, most notably the firm of Tauchnitz, founded in 1837, and its much younger competitor, the Albatross Press, founded with great promise in 1931. The nature of their organisation, operation and output changed, however, on the coming to power of the National Socialists in 1933. This paper examines the history of Tauchnitz and Albatross during the Third Reich; it follows the latter to occupied Paris and the control of the German military authorities; and it traces the attempts to re-establish both publishing houses through de-nazification and relocation in West Germany until the final collapse of both in the late 1940s. It exploits archival and other sources in the UK, France, Germany and the USA.
The paper recounts the mechanisms of censorship and control imposed by the state upon these companies; but it draws attention to the acute level of self-censorship that operating within such a regime produces. In addition, Jewish actual or perceived involvement in both publishing houses created problems of transfer of ownership. The Albatross, in its Paris incarnation, found its operations the object of the intensive Aryanisation programme adopted by the German administration for all French business. The difficulties of reasserting ownership and control in a dislocated postwar Europe are analysed. The paper draws two general conclusions: that the degree of state intervention to control publishing within a totalitarian regime is minimal; and that from 1933 onwards the centre of European publishing moved more clearly from a to-be-divided Germany to London (and New York).
Altenhein, Hans, 1968: Politics and the German book market
As “1968” has become shorthand for a fundamental and controversial change in West German attitudes and opinions, historical research into the events and movements of that time has taken over from narrative biography. In this context, the impact of print media on the protest movement of the day has been paid due attention. However, the creation of new writings, publications, and forms of distribution by that protest movement has received less attention.
This paper originates in a current project at Mainz University (Institut für Buchwissenschaft) that is concerned with just this topic. It consists of case studies in four fields of research: publishing (Voltaire Verlag), distribution (collective book shops), the reading public (Frankfurt Book Fair), and writers” commitment (Luchterhand advisory committee). The paper will present initial general conclusions from these studies.
Although there had been some sort of subcultural circulation of pirated editions (preferably of books published before and outside the Nazi regime) as well as homemade pamphlets, most of the protest movement literature was being distributed through the usual channels of the book and periodical market. On the other hand, this market, after its makeshift reconstruction in early post-war years, was just about to enter a period of accelerated modernisation of book production and distribution. So both anti-traditional processes, regardless of their contradictory objectives, came to benefit from each other. A wave of alternative literature washed over West Germany, resulting in a new “Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit” and subsiding only with the degeneration of the protest movement a decade later. This wave did not and could not reach East Germany, where the authorities were suspicious of the protest movement in the West.
Füssel, Stephan (read by Jasmin Adam), Book and Film during the Weimar Republic
This paper explores the relationship between the established medium of the book and the new medium of film within the context of the Weimar Republic. At a time in the 1920s when book sales were dropping and yet overproduction of books was being deplored, new opportunities opened up in the field of publishing in Germany. These consisted, on the one hand, of the development of new printing technologies allowing better quality illustrations and the addition of photographs in newspapers, magazines and books. On the other hand, two new media emerged: radio (which was widespread in Germany from 1923) and film (initially silent and then later the “talkies”). As a result many authors and publishers seized the opportunity of reaching a new audience by means of the mass medium film. For instance, an established publisher such as Reclam experienced considerable demand for works by Schiller and Goethe after the silent film on Schiller’s life and the well-known Faust film by Friedrich Murnau had been released in 1925. New genres, such as the big city novel and thriller as well as the new horror film, were much in demand. Many contemporary authors, such as Gerhart Hauptmann, tried to have their dramas and novels filmed right away. Thomas Mann actively supported the filming of his Buddenbrooks. The expressionists Carl Hauptmann, Georg Kaiser and Alfred Döblin experimented consciously with the new medium. Some publishers, such as S. Fischer, inserted subsidiary film rights into their publishing contracts.
The Ullstein publishing house in Berlin was particularly creative in its marketing strategies. Originally a publisher of newspapers and magazines, Ullstein became one of the leading book publishers in the twenties. One of the most telling examples of its marketing was Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues, one of the absolute bestsellers of the decade. Originally serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in November 1928, it had sold 3.5 million copies by 1932. After the release of Lewis Milestone’s film All Quite on the Western Front, the book attracted an international audience and was translated into 28 languages. Heinrich Mann had a similar experience. His novel Professor Unrat, published by Albert de Langen in 1905, attracted little attention. Only after Ullstein had included the novel into its “Gelbe Reihe” (Yellow Series) in 1925 did it sell well, approximately 100,000 copies by 1930. But the real breakthrough came with the film The Blue Angel directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich. Following the success of that film, translations of the novel into Polish, Czech, British English, French, Japanese, Italian and Russian were published. In 1944 the novel was translated into American English. Heinrich Mann who at that time was living in exile in the United States was enthusiastic about the version: “Finally I have become an American author. The New York Times is comparing me with Tolstoy.”
04B - Cities and Countries
Signe Jantson (co-author: Tiiu Rreimo), German Books on the Estonian Literary Marketplace: Booktrade in the Middle of the 19th Century
Books, written, printed or created in any other form, have many different roles in society. First of all books are meant for communicating knowledge be it a text or a picture. That makes books cultural agents, transmitting information from one country to another and from one generation to another. Books are mediated from a publisher to a reader mainly by booksellers. The book trade is a complex study object as it essentially depends from the economic, political and social situation of a country.
Starting from the 13th century the upper class in Estonia was formed by Germans. Being a part of the Tsarist Russia for two centuries did not remove neither the political nor the cultural supremacy of the German nobility and literati. In the middle of the 19th century the booktrade in Estonia was in the hands of German booksellers and German books (both imported and published in Estonia) were the majority of trade articles on the Estonian literary marketplace. Fearing the revolutionary movement in Europe the tsarist government started to restrict the import of books from abroad, including Germany: censorhip was strengthened and customs duties were increased. The restrictions caused difficulties in trading – some bookshop owners gave their business up, the others tried to replace the lack of German books by increasing the amount of local publishing articles, especially the Estonian language books. Estonian language book production increased tenfold during the second half of the 19th century and provided the preconditions for building an Estonian language bookmarket. Still, German cultural influences on the literary marketplace remained obvious up to the end of the 19th century.
The paper aims to demonstrate how the political and economic changes afflict the bookmarket. The objectives are to analyse the development and changes in publishing, printing and booktrade in Estonia, to characterize the activities of bookshops, the content and thematic range of the bookmarket in the middle of the 19th century. Up to today, not much attention has been given in book history to the development of book production and dissemination in smaller, often multicultural (and multilingual) cultural areas. The study of Estonian book history provides a good opportunity to follow the general features of this development in the context of a national cultural area.
Gagnon, Isabelle, From Poland to Quebec: Trading People, Trading Ideas, Trading Memories or Alice Parizeau's Critical Reception in Quebec
Is there any better form of exchange between nations than that of one person belonging to one culture and to a given territory, moving to and making a home for herself in a new country that encompasses a culture, ideology and ways of thinking that are, per force, completely different? Despite initial appearances, such a move does represent a genuine exchange. The displaced person and her adopted culture each in their turn gives and receives elements that contribute to the development of their own identity.
In my paper, I will focus on the representation of an East-West exchange that affected the field of Québécois literature, i.e. the immigration to Quebec of the Polish author Alice Parizeau, born Poznanska. Since her arrival in Quebec from Poland in 1955, she has carved for herself an enviable position in the literary, cultural and social milieu of the province. Generally speaking, my paper will try to ascertain the real impact of her work on Québécois literature. Did her fiction, through its style, form and themes, modify the literary context of the time, for example? Specifically, I will study the critical reception of three of her novels – Les lilas fleurissent à Varsovie, La charge des sangliers and Ils se sont connus à Lwow – all of which deal with World War II. I will attempt to analyze how Quebec readers (limited here to literary critics) who were experiencing this major conflict only through a third party, i.e. soldiers, reacted to the books’ plotlines. Did they identify with them? Did these stories register on the Québécois literary critics’ “horizon of expectations”, to borrow a favourite term of H.R. Jauss? Were the critics inclined to embrace her work or did it serve to emphasize her immigrant status and her foreignness within Québécois society, using as she does that status as the theme of her novels and language that marks her as “other”? These are some of the questions that I intend to explore in my paper in order to support my thesis that a literary culture acquires depth, breadth and significance – essential elements in the evolution of that culture – with each emigrant writer that it welcomes.
While the phenomenon of migrant literature has been the focus of much research with regard to the themes in certain bodies of work (Harel, Bernier), or to more systemic approaches (Moisan and Hildebrand) or bibliographical approaches (Chartier), my work on the critical reception of emigrant authors, taking as it does a sociological perspective, is without precedence in the field of Québécois literary research.
Towheed, Shafquat, Geneva vs. St. Petersburg: Two Concepts of Legal Ownership in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911)
International copyright law has often been viewed as having an incidental effect on the life of the book and an accidental, sometimes beneficial, sometimes detrimental, consequence on the financial and literary success of the author. While the determining influence of the burgeoning domain and scope of international copyright law on the production and distribution of books in the late 19th and early 20th century has been acknowledged by lawyers as well as book historians and bibliographers, there has been relatively little attention given to its creative and imaginative implications for authors in the same period. From the starting point of the Berne Convention of 1886 (the first tentative international copyright law), the progressive and discontinuous expansion of both the domain and the effectiveness of international copyright legislation meant increasing remuneration for authors, and greater legal recognition of their rights. For Joseph Conrad, this legal expansion, and specifically, the terms of the 1911 UK Copyright Act, was critical in securing his precarious financial situation, allowing him to pursue simultaneous serialisation and publications on both sides of the Atlantic and thereby pay off some of his mounting debts. There were both bibliographic and creative implications for the changing nature of copyright law in this period, and perhaps uniquely, Conrad’s chimerical novel (his first simultaneously serialisation in England in the English Review and America in the North American Review) allows us to read both the structural and the personal aspects of this dialogue.
This essay offers a detailed reading of the fictional depiction (and implications) of the legal standing of texts (manuscripts, private diaries, works in translation, newspapers and the printed book) in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a novel which displays an almost obsessive interest in the proprietorship of the written word. In Under Western Eyes, I shall argue, Conrad worked through many of his ideas about the recognition of both the moral and legal rights of the author, and nowhere was this clearer than in the stark contrast between the recognition of authorial copyright in Switzerland and Tsarist Russia. As the birthplace of international copyright law, Switzerland maintained one of the most efficient systems of protecting the right of the author anywhere in the world. Swiss copyright law at the time of Conrad’s writing of Under Western Eyes protected all authors of books published in Switzerland, regardless of their nationality, for the period of the life of the author plus thirty years. Russia on the other hand, maintained the most retrogressive posture on copyright law in Europe; she had reneged on the two bilateral treaties signed in 1861 (with France and Belgium), was opposed to the Berne Convention, and refused outright to acknowledge the rights of foreign authors, or indeed, translators. In Russia, copyright protection was inextricably linked to state censorship and the control of imaginative literature in circulation. In contrast, Geneva was historically at the forefront of the printing and reading revolution in Western Europe and by 1911, had a centuries’ old tradition of freedom of speech and printing. Caught between Geneva and St. Petersburg and their conflicting ideas of the legal ownership of texts, and straddling the ostensibly clarifying imposition of the 1911 Copyright Act, Conrad’s novel displays the creative anxiety caused by the mutually imbricated epistemes of “Law” and “Literature”. Conrad’s critique of Russian autocracy extends to its effects on the legal status of literature, both inside Russia and abroad. Echoing the overtly political warning that he had issued in his essay “Autocracy and War” (1905), Under Western Eyes demonstrates that the lack of a clear definition or recognition of authorial copyright in Tsarist Russia and the stringency of its Imperial censorship had implications well beyond Russia’s borders. Conrad’s novel presents the circulation of texts of dubious provenance and indeterminate legal status through the determining intervention of the teacher of languages. The language teacher maintains an ambivalent position with his texts throughout the course of the narration. What is the legal status of the multiple texts – Haldin’s diary, Natalia’s letters, smuggled newspapers and Razumov’s report and diary – translated, edited and mediated by the teacher of languages? Is he a proliferating pirate, playing free and loose with unprotected, unpublished work outside of the domain of international copyright legislation? Or is the teacher of languages attempting to determine and protect (even posthumously) the rights of the authors of whose texts he is the sole custodian? Under Western Eyes offers the narrative trace of a novel inscribed by the changing legal circumstances of its composition and deeply concerned about its own textual status, all the time interrogating through the mode of fiction, both the moral and the legal rights of the author – rights which in 1911, were neither universally guaranteed nor accepted.
04C - The Early Modern Dutch Book
Salman, Jeroen, Itinerant trade in Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th century
As a first step of a large research project into the role of the Dutch pedlar in the periode 1600-1850 I would like to explore the itinerant book trade in 17th and 18th century Amsterdam, the centre of the Dutch publishing industry. We are relatively well informed about Amsterdam as an international centre of book trade, as an advanced printing centre and as a bulwark of the free press. The functioning of the internal book trade and especially the role of the street-trader within this distribution network however, has hardly been the object of detailed research. In this paper I want to make a start to correct this omission. The hypothesis driving this exploration is that in the highly urbanized Netherlands the itinerant functioned as a crucial extension of the established booksellers in the towns.
First of all, I would like to assess the informative value of a broad range of archival sources in order to map this heterogonous group. This comprises a widely varied corpus of administrative sources (ordinances, statutes), economic sources (guild archives, tax data, probate inventories, market registrations), legal sources (sentence books, licences, contracts, censorship), literary sources (plays, prose, satire, ego documents), and iconographic sources (prints, paintings). In the Netherlands we unfortunately lack general sources such as the English Licensing of Hawkers and Pedlars Act (1696-1697).
Secondly, I want to focus on the geographical, social and cultural backgrounds of the local pedlar. This information can for instance make visible whether the pedlars had any opportunities for social mobility and what the differences were between urban street hawkers and pedlars serving the countryside.
Thirdly, I want to lay bare the extension and organisation of the street trade, the mutual cooperation between local street vendors and the contacts between pedlars and established booksellers. Therefore I need to examine the activities undertaken by pedlars for acquiring trade goods, financing, transporting and selling them. As a framework for the organisation of the street-trade I shall use four ideal types: a) the occasional trader selling printed matter now and then to supplement his income; b) the pedlar selling printed matter and other goods (such as consumer goods); c) the pedlar selling only printed matter; d) the specialised pedlar selling only a certain category of printed matter (such as newspapers, prints etc). This typology also helps to analyse the fluent transition between itinerant and established book trade.
Boterbloem, Kees, “Met een beschaafder Penne…”: The Context and Genesis of Jan Struys’s Perillous Voyages
This paper investigates why works such as Jan Struys (c.1630-1694)’s Perillous Voyages (Drie aanmerkelyke en seer rampsoedige Reysen… (Amsterdam: Van Meurs en van Someren, 1676); English: The perillous and most unhappy voyages of John Struys… (London: S. Smith, 1683)) were published. Jacob van Meurs (d.1680) had shown a proclivity since the early 1660s for publishing cosmographies, especially those penned by the Amsterdam medic Olfert Dapper (1639-89) and the classicist Arnoldus Montanus (1625-83). Dapper’s and Montanus’s treatises on Africa, Asia, and the Americas seem intended to present a comprehensive description of the globe in stages. By the mid-1670s, Van Meurs, now cooperating with van Someren, tried to broaden the audience for such cosmographies by packaging them differently: The Perillous Voyages is one of three works that are both titillating adventure stories of heroic Dutch seafarers in exotic locales (Schouten, Struys, van der Heijden) and ethnographic and geographic descriptions in the style of Dapper and Montanus. In fact, Struys’s work was probably expanded by using notes collected by the politically (temporarily) disgraced Dapper, who had supported the de Witt faction against the house of Orange in 1672. The popularity of the reports on Muscovite affairs appearing in the monthly Hollandtsche Mercurius or in the pamphlet Kort waerachtigh Verhaal (1671) and the growing interest generated by the increasingly close economic and political ties with Muscovy influenced their decision to publish a version of Struys’s tales, many of which focussed on the tsar’s empire. Whereas a handful had been published in Dutch in bookform since the 1610s (Massa, Gerritsz, Goeteeris, Danckaert, Olearius), Dutch readers around 1670 merely could turn to obsolete, second-hand or foreign-authored descriptions of Muscovy, a country with which especially Amsterdam conducted a lively trade. That there was a market for such an account is apparent from the almost simultaneous appearance of an anonymous work on Muscovy written by a member of the Dutch embassy that visited Muscovy in 1675-6 (Koyett). Half-cosmography, half-adventure story, Perillous Voyages seems to the (post-) modern reader a poorly composed work. But in its day it was highly popular in Western Europe, as its Amsterdam publishers seem to have anticipated in petitioning the Provincial Estates of Holland for a licence prohibiting pirated editions. Struys’s work and its parallel texts underwent a number of reprints in Dutch, and Perillous Voyages was published and republished in numerous French, German, and English translations between 1676 and the 1830s.
Kelly, William Ashford, A Survey of pre-1801 Low Countries Imprints in Scottish Research Libraries: Results and Further Proposals
The burden of my paper will present the results of my recent survey of the holdings of pre-1801 Low Countries imprints in Scottish research libraries. It is my hope that the Ministry of Education of the Netherlands and of Flanders can be persuaded to use this survey and that conducted by Prof. Reinier Salverda of University College, London of such imprints in the London area to finance a survey covering the whole of the U.K. As the European Commission is keen to involve several member states in educational and cultural projects, it would be helpful to extend such a survey to cover libraries in the Republic of Ireland.
04D - Translation and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Wiggin, Bethany, The Birth of the German Novel from the Esprit of the French: French Novels and German Translations, 1680-1720
In Halle of 1702, law student and aspiring publicist, Nicolaus Gundling, penned a scathing satire of overzealous critics of the newest literary fashion: the novel (Roman). In an article for his journal New Conversations, Gundling took on the novel’s most outspoken critic, Gotthard Heidegger, a Swiss Calvinist minister, by slyly attacking the man’s intimate knowledge of racy French novels. It seemed, Gundling opined, that his opponent had “perhaps read no other novels than those Histoires Galantes and Amours Secrettes [sic] about which even clever Frenchmen laugh.” Some three years earlier, Heidegger had unleashed a rabid attack on the Roman. In his treatise, Mythoscopia Romantica, he revealed himself to be a careful reader of more than histoires galantes. He had reviewed Pierre Daniel Huet’s Treatise on the Origin of the Novel (1670) at length, happily granting Huet’s claims for a special French affinity for the novel. Novels, as read both by Huet and Heidegger, documented French esprit, a product of French women’s active participation in gallant sociability. Translated onto German soil, Heidegger asserted, French esprit was emasculating the German nation, transforming a land of formerly heroic warriors into French fops. Gundling’s attack on Heidegger provides just one example of the many paper feuds provoked by the perceived dangers and merits of the fashionable French books beginning in the 1680s. Gundling, it would seem, defended the novel, while Heidegger wished it censored entirely. Yet, Gundling’s send-up of Heidegger hinged upon the charge that the good minister has read only those novels ridiculed even by wise French minds.
This paper investigates these “Histoires Galantes and Amours Secrettes” derided by both men. While many critics documented their anxiety about French influence, an industry grew up to make these books available to German readers. I focus on the networks of translators and authors radiating from the Gleditsch press in Leipzig, publishing hub for novels in German. While considerable numbers of French-language novels were rapidly done into German, they have never been considered part of the history of the German novel. But it was these very books – whether read in the original French, translated, or adapted into “original” novels – which gave form to the nascent genre in German. It was the esprit of these French novels, I argue, which heralded the birth of the novel in German.
Bowers, Toni, Amatory Fiction's Phony Translations
Toward the end of the 17th century, a particular kind of prose fiction began to appear in Britain – the racy tales of sexual intrigue that recent critics have called "amatory fiction.” One frequent feature of the genre was what this essay calls the "phony translation": a claim, usually in the prefatory material or even in the work's title, and often in the author's own voice, that the tale to follow is not a work of original fiction but merely a translation of an existing work, often one originally published in a Continental language. Why, this paper asks, did British writers of amatory fiction build in this recurrent claim to what sounds to modern ears like a derivative status, this insistence on calling themselves mere translators rather than authors? I argue for the necessity of understanding the phony translation in historical terms.
To start, we need to recognize the peculiar meanings and functions of "translation" in late-seventeenth and eighteenth century British literary culture. A claim to be a translator was not an acknowledgment of subordinate or non-creative status, and to call oneself a translator may not have been nearly as self-deprecating as today's readers might assume. A historical understanding of the phony translation in British amatory fiction of the late-17th and 18th centuries also demands that we examine similar topoi in other forms of fiction from the same period. Chief among these, I locate a recurrent claim encountered in a number of early works of fiction that, unlike most amatory tales, enjoy canonical status today – the claim that the author is really an editor. When we place amatory fictions’ insistence on their own status as translations in a wider frame that includes more mainstream novels' insistence on their status as editions, our question necessarily expands. Now we must ask not only why writers of the particular genre of amatory fiction chose to be seen as translators rather than authors, but why early writers of fiction more broadly defined so often chose to be identified not as originators of their own stories, but rather as transmitters or organizers of received tales. The phony translation in amatory fiction is, in this light, a subset of a phenomenon with much greater resonance.
The claim to non-originality is connected, sometimes explicitly, to authorial anxiety about the possibility of readers' resistance to such depictions. Passing as a translator or editor, rather than an author, allows writers to distance themselves from their tales' most incendiary suggestions – its depictions not only of sexual behaviors but also of specifically female desires and sexual agents. At the same time, though, the strategy allows those destabilizing insinuations to stand, constituting an implicit, if disavowed, act of resistance.
McMurran, Mary Helen, Eighteenth-Century Translators: The Business of Leisure
What kind of role did translators play in the turbulent and expanding world of eighteenth-century European publishing? Despite the many disparaging comments made about exploitative booksellers pitted against struggling hack translators, historical sources show that booksellers and translators were in fact avid collaborators. The translation market was already spurred by the absence of any international copyright laws, and the structural predisposition of the print market towards transnational trade in the eighteenth century, but the financial risk of publication was still significant. Booksellers, translators and their intermediaries engaged in a collective course of risk management because, even without interference from the original author and the original publishing house, there were obstacles to publishing a translation. Those works that posed the greatest potential profits were the newest works from high-profile authors, and new translations of steady-selling classics, but these works were also the most likely to be undertaken by a translator, and therefore the most risky choices because of the threat of competition. In other words, since no one could have the exclusive right to publish a translation, the business of getting a work translated was wide open, and it put pressure on translators to choose a foreign original well and translate it quickly. Many translators worked “on spec,” doing the translation on their own and then offering it for publication, though some were contracted directly by the bookseller. In many instances, both parties worked through intermediaries juggling the risks and costs of a new venture. Evidence from the memoirs and personal letters of Elizabeth Griffith, Tobias Smollett, Sarah Scott, Oliver Goldsmith, and Charlotte Lennox evince that everyone was attempting to discern the best way to maximize success. These documents also reveal that women, like men, were eager to become published translators in addition to becoming published authors. With no stringent regulation on translation other than inchoate market forces, the kinds of calculations and negotiations made by translators were variable, but they reveal an increasing sense of insecurity. Translators were chary about their prospects when there were few guarantees of success. This is an interesting phenomenon not least because it reversed a long-standing tradition in which translating was a leisurely and edifying activity rather than a product with a definable exchange value.
04E - Politics and Book Distribution
Zakarauskiene, Zivile, Peculiarity of the Lithuanian Book Trade
The aim of this article is to represent the peculiarities of modern Lithuanian book trade. But it is not possible to talk about that before the whole history of the book trade in Lithuania has not been reviewed. All essential changes of it were caused mainly by political changes. Most important of them were: the incorporation of Lithuania into the Russian empire in eighteenth century, hard censorship of Russia, forty years of Lithuanian press prohibition, declaration of independent Republic of Lithuania in 1918 and fifty years of occupations till 1990. So the article consists of two parts.
The first part describes five main periods of the book trade in Lithuania. The first period is from the Middle Ages till the year of 1864 – the book trade beginning and development in Lithuania. Distinction of this period is the dominance in the market of the literature in different foreign languages and minority of books in Lithuanian language. The second period is from the year of 1864 till 1904, the period of Lithuanian press prohibition, when publication, press and reading books in Lithuanian language were prohibited. At the same time, this is the beginning of the struggle for the use of native language. Lithuanian books printed in Königsberg and delivered from there secretly became the most marketable items and the most important means of seeking to preserve national identity through the native language. The third period takes part from the Lithuanian press prohibition termination in1904 until declaration of the independency of the Republic of Lithuania in 1918. This is the period of the establishment of the first Lithuanian book store and the beginning of the development of national book trade. The fourth period started at the year of 1918 and continued till 1940. Those were the years of independent Republic of Lithuania when national book trade became booming and enlarging. The fifth period is the period of the occupation including the Second World War. After the end of the war Lithuanian book trade became the part of the book trade of the USSR and was supposed to be reliant of communistic ideology and planned economy as well. As the consequence of that Lithuanian book trade incurred marked disadvantage and loss.
The second more detailed part of the article represents the modern Lithuanian book trade. After the Republic of Lithuania has reinstated the independency on 11 March 1990, until it has joined the European Union on 1 May 2004, great changes in political and economical life of the country influenced the cultural life. During this period Lithuanian book trade as well as the other business areas had not only to redress losses, but also to take challenges trying to adapt scientific and technological strides in order to fulfill changeable cultural and informational needs of the society. The analysis appeals to the history of the bookstore and the trademark of Juozas Masiulis. This is only bookstore which has survived all through the twentieth century. Therefore it fully reflects all changes of Lithuanian book trade during the twentieth century.
Brisson, Frédéric, Dominating a Foreign Book Market through Control of Its Distribution Channel: The France-Quebec Case
The substantial market share enjoyed by imported books has represented a controversial matter in a number of countries. Among those countries which export books, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France have been particularly dominant. These three countries emerged in the 18th century as strong publishing centres and, through a series of mutations over a long period of time, expanded their range of influence.* Their export of books has been accompanied by the introduction of their own commercial systems into the markets they penetrate. In some cases, these systems have facilitated better access for foreign publications than has been experienced by the domestic productions of such countries.
Since 1960, Quebec – Canada’s predominantly French-speaking province – has witnessed the progressive alignment of its domestic book distribution structure with a model introduced by publishers from France. Commanding a strong market share (approximately 75%) in Quebec and attracted by the market growth that followed the post-war baby boom, French publishers such as Hachette, Flammarion, Gallimard, and Le Seuil established branch plants in the province then imposed their commercial structure on the local market. Thus, between 1960 and 1980, the Quebec book world experienced a shift from its traditional distribution system, which was based on wholesaling, to a new structure premised on exclusive arrangements between publishers and distributors.
The introduction of this model met local resistance, with much of the criticism framed within a discourse of nationalism: a first “Affaire Hachette” broke out in 1969, followed by another one, even more polemical, in 1972. As a result, although the French publishers succeeded in implementing their commercial system in the province, the Quebec-owned book sector obtained some legislative advantages and secured the possibility to compete in the new system. Much more than a simple commercial conflict, the debate engendered by the issue clearly revealed the importance of the book in the definition of Quebec’s cultural and social identity. It also shed light on the international dimension of the book trade and the circulation of ideas. Finally, the values underlying this controvery remain current, as revealed by the recent adoption of the UNESCO convention on cultural diversity.
* Ample evidence of this phenomenon was provided in the papers at the Sherbrooke (Canada) international conference on publishing in 2000, the proceedings of which have been published under the title Les mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000 (Montreal/Paris, PUL/L’Harmattan, 2001).
Hakapää, Jyrki, Foreign or Domestic Preferences for Book Store’s Assortment? European Elite Culture and National Culture in the Nineteenth-Century Book Distribution Networks
The very first modern open book stores were established in Finland during the late 18th century. They began to work in biggest towns as distant book sellers in the European high cultural distribution network, ordering books for the local elite from Sweden, Germany, France, Russia, and British Isles. However, soon after the book store network had settled to bigger administrational, academic and merchant towns, discussion and activities on local national culture began to develop its own cultural sphere.
Language and literature became the main sphere of activity where the roots and images of Finnish culture were produced and examined. In the 1840s newspapers in Finland began to discuss if book store keepers were able to earn their living when working only on domestic or better say, national products. A decade later a common understanding among professionals of the field was still that this was not yet to be done. Swedish production maintained its leading position in the book markets, and book stores even in the smaller towns sought, if only without success, to import printed works all the way from Leipzig. What more annoying to book stores, many products of national culture were sold through other networks in the first place: writers spread and sold their titles via their friends and colleagues, societies used their members and also while promoting national culture and education, cut the profits while asking meagre profit or giving examples for free.
The presentation seeks to present the nature of book stores’ selections in one of the 19th century European national cultures which, although ready to support the local cultural efforts, would however not offer a self sufficient book production to fulfil local clienteles’ needs. International book production continued to maintain an important portion at book stores’ sales. Furthermore many local domestic titles were only scarcely spread through book store network. In the end I show how a book store had to offer both international and domestic national printed works for a successful career in the business and how in fact the national culture would use book store network limitedly, creating a book culture that was not built on a capitalistic market system. Aside the book stores themselves, attention is also given to varying clienteles, divided by languages and social standing, that were to be found in Finland in the early 19th century, and their possibilities to take part in the print culture.
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Last updated: 23 June 2006