The Evolution of the Book by Frederick G. Kilgour

Author:Frederick G. Kilgour
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780195118599
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

Publishing and the Book Trade

When he took over Gutenberg’s assets Johann Fust also acquired Peter Schoeffer, a superb technician who had worked with Gutenberg. Together they created a business, printing and publishing books that would find a market, and they established a distribution network of agents and traveling salesmen. By the time of his death, on a bookselling trip to Paris in the spring of 1466, Fust had already established a bookselling agent in Lubeck. Schoeffer engaged an agent in Paris in 1468, two years before the first book was printed in that city, and in 1470 a traveling salesman selling Schoeffer’s books was in Nuremberg. Since it would certainly have cost less to supply a traveling salesman with books than to stock an agency, it is likely that Fust began to retain salesmen as early as 1462, after he and Schoeffer had published four books.

Peter Drach of Speyer, a printer, publisher, and bookseller who had established a large printshop by the 1480s, built a network of agencies and outlets in Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Leipzig, Augsburg, Landshut, Prague, Brno, Halberstadt, Stendal, and Basel. Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, a patrician whose family included wealthy bankers, was the largest printer-publisher of the fifteenth century. Koberger, whose business network extended as far south as Lyons, was one of the early printers to contract with other printers to print his books as a technique of maintaining steady work for his own shop, which at times had more than a hundred employees. He exemplified the great printer-publishers who dominated the German market for decades.

Printing spread across Europe with amazing rapidity. More than no towns had presses by 1480. Venice became the “capital of printing,” with 156 editions published in 1480–1482, followed by Milan (82), Augsburg (67), Nuremberg (53), Florence (48), Cologne (44), Paris (35), and Rome (34). The years 1495–1497 produced 1,821 editions, 447 (24.5 percent) of which came out of Venice; Paris produced 181 and Lyon 95. By the century’s end 236 towns had printing presses installed and 35,000 editions of books had been published.34

Clearly an effective trade organization for the sale of books had been established by the 1490s. The major expositions for the new trade in books were the great international fairs, particularly those in Lyons and Frankfurt, both of which existed before the invention of printing. Publishers brought books to sell, as well as lists of books yet to appear, and drew up agreements with one another for future sales whereby they gained access to each other’s outlets—peddlers, agents, and bookstores. In the sixteenth century the Frankfurt book fair established Frankfurt as the center of publishing in Germany, but in 1597 the imperial censorship commission began to supervise the fair, which led to its slow demise. In the mid—seventeenth century the fair moved to Leipzig, where it flourished until the Second World War, after which it moved back to Frankfurt and became outstandingly successful.

A barter system made possible the widespread distribution of books throughout Europe without transfer of money. Ideally the

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