The case for books: past, present and future

Abstract

Based on the correspondence between editors, philosophical writers and booksellers, as well as contracts granting the right to print and sell the Encyclopédie, Robert Darnton identifies in The Business of Enlightenment (1979) publisher conflicts and lucrative maneuvers in the lettered culture market in the 1700s. Thirty years after the first edition of this study, and taking into account the mechanisms of control for the production and circulation of printed knowledge, Darnton presents in The case for books (2009) challenging divergences and lucid identities between the (almost) two and a half centuries that separate pre-revolutionary France from the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The thematic identity common to the two works is also present in the current reworking of the opening phrase of the 1979 text. In The Business of Enlightenment Darnton describes the results of his research as "a book about a book". In The Case for Books the historian reuses his consecrated formula by publishing "a book about books" (p.vii). In the plural the author inscribes the first divergent situation. In 1979 Darnton studied the history of the publication of a single book, the Encyclopédie. Thirty years later, and after having been director of Harvard University's network of libraries for a little over two years, Darnton identifies in the position he assumed in June 2007 "an opportunity to do something about the questions which... he had studied as historic phenomena" (p.ix). These questions were preeminent: "as soon as I transferred to the new office, I discovered that Harvard Library was involved in secret conversations with Google about a project that took my breath away", Darnton reports. "Google planned to digitalize millions of books, starting with Harvard's collection and with those of another three university libraries, and to make the digital copies