The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe, 1450–1850 by Joseph P. McDermott

Author:Joseph P. McDermott [McDermott, Joseph P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9789888313655
Publisher: HongKongUP
Published: 2015-08-13T05:00:00+00:00

Distribution Networks

Beyond the central source of distribution were the local feeder networks sending on centrally produced goods but also adding their own locally printed, usually small-job publications. In addition, secondhand and antiquarian book distribution greatly increased in volume and complexity. Peddlers, hawkers, colporteurs, and chapmen comprised a small army of low-cost traveling salespeople in mainland Europe, selling everyday household goods like buttons, gloves, napkins, cloth, small books, and pamphlets (see Plate 4.1). As systems of distribution steered trade development, the most far-reaching retail networks were those worked by ballad sellers, country chapmen and minstrels, and the many colorful peddler-families in France and Italy described by Laurence Fontaine.38 Early modern Europe shared with early modern China a dependence on family dynasties and kinship alliances for the distribution of popular tracts through the generations and across the mountains and valleys. Many of their practices, and indeed circuits endured for centuries, as demonstrated in studies such as those by Jean-François Botrel chronicling book peddling in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain.39 Fig. 4.4 features a nineteenth-century Spanish drawing of one of the hundreds of blind sellers (and singers) of ballads and other cheap print familiar to both village and city life. In many respects, the rounds of nineteenth-century chapmen and peddlers matched the activities of their forebears in the sixteenth century.40 Some circuits were intricate and regional but others were spectacularly long-distance. One surviving account records eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian farm workers in Friuli buying printed stock from the Remondini firm of Bassano in the winter months and then taking these cheap publications into Eastern Europe, even as far as Kiev.41 Here is the equivalent of the connections throughout the Chinese empire along the Yangzi valley and the Grand Canal—and yet also a difference in the social and economic underpinnings of long-distance book commerce. The support of private collectors and the sustained demand and producer-client relationship entailed by book collecting represented a very different type of networking from that developed speculatively by traveling humble salespeople, humbly capitalized and bearing other humble goods (also collected from central repositories). Neither extreme benefited from assured, closed clientage, yet the market operated in very different ways according to type of commercial product and type of customer.

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