From the very beginnings of printing, printers and *publishers needed to advertise books, both to individual purchasers and to other members of the burgeoning book trade. Itinerant and sedentary booksellers also needed to provide information about their holdings for their potential clients. This need is still felt, but it is now much easier to engage in publicity and to provide much more information about the merchandise than was the case in the past. Potential purchasers can now expect to be told about authors (and their other works, where relevant), the title of their work, where and when it was (or is to be) produced, whether it is illustrated or not, how long it is, its size, and its price. Shoppers can also expect to find a summary of its contents and may even be given some short reviews by experts in the field rehearsing its strengths. Electronic forms of advertisement can even provide long excerpts as a further incentive. Until recently, purchasers would have expected to acquire a book in some form of binding, but now it is possible to possess a given work only in an electronic form.
These elements of bookselling were not all present from the beginning. In the second half of the fifteenth century, book advertisements by printer-publishers either were broadsides or formed part of one of their publications, whose title page, by the 1480s, had come also to act as an advertisement for the contents of a book, and possibly also an indication of the sort(s) of purchasers for whom the book was intended. The great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius’s (1449/52–1515) separate printed broadside of 1498 listing his Greek books with their prices in five subject classes (“in grammatica,” “in poetica,” “in logica,” “in philosophia,” “in Scriptura sacra”) is often seen as the first book sales catalog proper. The earliest catalogs were addressed to retail customers; thereafter book advertisement came to address itself to the wholesale trade too. It adapted itself to the commercial and legal context and the structure of the book trade, in which printers, publishers, and various kinds of booksellers all engaged. Their roles could overlap, and in some cases be united in one person: any of them might decide to issue a catalog of their stock, or of new books, or of books about to appear.
At this time, books did not have a fixed price. They were sold inclusive or exclusive of transport costs, and at variable discounts to the trade and to retail customers; prices were mainly not printed in catalogs, although they might be added in handwriting for a specific client. This happened in Aldus’s second catalog of 1503, which covered his Latin books and small formats as well as the Greek. The date of a given entry in the catalog was also more often omitted than included: this was done to allow book merchants to produce simultaneously an edition with title pages bearing sequential dates, to give the impression that they were selling books “hot off the press.”
By the middle of the sixteenth century, a clear distinction emerged between “mart catalogs” (produced for a specific occasion of sale) and “stock catalogs” (which might list the production of a given printshop, or a bookshop, or a mixture of the two). In the 1540s, sales catalogs in Paris were printed for the first time in the form of small booklets rather than broadsides or appendixes; that of Chrétien Wechel (1495–1554) provided the sparse information that became a widely accepted model: author, short title, place of publication or sale, printer or publisher, and format. Wechel’s contemporary Robert Estienne (1503–59), on the other hand, gave more information about each of his publications. The use by international booksellers of book fairs, notably that of Frankfurt, led to the emergence of printed fair catalogs, of which the earliest known is that of the Augsburg book merchant George Willer in 1564. These catalogs, which were quite expensive, did not state prices, as they were issued for both retail customers and the trade; but they all specified format. The date of the edition was also implied by the requirement that the entry was a “new, improved or enlarged edition,” but the practice referred to above of producing simultaneously sequential editions helped merchants to circumvent this, and make repeated declarations of their wares. Declarations were usually in the tersest form, but publishers of important works (such as Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius [Starry messenger] of 1610) were allowed to extend their entries to highlight their importance.
Fair catalogs were organized by language (Latin before German) and subject (the university higher disciplines of theology, law, medicine, followed by history, arts, poetry, and music). A very small entry of *vernacular books in languages other than German followed. In most fair catalogs, the books were listed in the order that notice of them was received by the fair authorities, who took over the administration of the fair catalogs in 1597. Redacted versions of the Frankfurt fair catalog appeared in Italy and England; these were designed for use by both book collectors and merchants.
The attendees at the fairs also affixed “nomenclaturae” or broadside printed lists of most of or all the products of their presses to their stalls. These were usually organized so as to highlight the specialties of the publisher in question. By the end of the sixteenth century, booksellers too began to produce printed lists of their holdings, sometimes indicating that these extended well beyond the titles included in their catalogs. One striking example is Cornelis Claesz’s Amsterdam bookshop catalog of 1604, whose title page announced the availability on request of “a huge multitude of bound books in every faculty.” While much of this material was printed, there were still manuscript catalogs sent in letters by booksellers to their clients: Duke August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg’s library at Wolfenbüttel is testament to his remarkable assiduity in collecting books of all sorts and contains many of these that were sent to him by his agents throughout Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. Many of those sent by Lyonnais book merchants such as the Huguetans to the Italian book agent and librarian Antonio Magliabechi in the second half of the century survive. Publishers of books had from the beginning seen the benefit of adding to the last gathering of their productions short catalogs of other books available from their presses, often with prices fixed at the retail rate: the very successful group of Genevan publishers led by Jean Antoine Chouët and Samuel de Tournes did this regularly from the final years of the seventeenth century onward.
Meanwhile, the market for secondhand books grew in importance. First, a generation of European itinerant book merchants purchased these from a variety of places and then offered them for sale, whether bound or unbound, in printed catalogs. From the end of the sixteenth century, sales catalogs were issued when libraries were auctioned. One of the earliest (if not the earliest) of these was Jeremias Martius’s Catalogus bibliothecae, which appeared in Augsburg in 1572. Auction and secondhand book catalogs contained mostly bound books and were mainly organized in the sequence of fair subjects, and within each rubric, by size, with folios preceding the smaller formats. These sorts of catalog were a very notable feature of the Dutch market, in which inventories of the possessions of a deceased person were a legal requirement; they also appeared in Spain, though rarely in printed form, from a similar date. There are some French and a very few Italian examples, for in those countries there was no legal requirement to publish such inventories. In several European contexts, censored books could be excluded from catalogs, but not in the United Provinces with its laxer relationship to regulations; in some catalogs there was even a rubric “libri prohibiti.”
Bibliophilia—the taste for books considered rare because of their content or their provenance—formed a subsection of the trade in secondhand books. Books from the library of a famous scholar, for example, had been sought after from the very beginnings of printing. The collecting of books for their other features (specialized subjects, illustrations, bindings) came a little later. In the early nineteenth century, other desirable features were listed by Thomas Dibdin (an early commentator on bibliophilia) as “first editions, true editions, blackletter-printed books, large paper copies; uncut books with edges that are not sheared by binder’s tools; illustrated copies; unique copies with morocco binding or silk lining; and copies printed on *vellum.” Octavo editions of the Aldine classics (books produced by Aldus Manutius in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) constitute an early example of collecting not motivated by the consumption of the content: these were avidly snapped up by purchasers in the 1510s. Rare and beautiful bindings became an object of collection by the second half of the sixteenth century; patriotic collections of vernacular literature, such as that by the duc de la Vallière in the latter half of the eighteenth century, began somewhat later.
After the French Revolution, the release on to the market of very large numbers of aristocratic and monastic libraries boosted the trade in incunabula and other rare books. These were first sold by agents; later, specialist booksellers and auctioneers developed the *subgenre of the antiquarian book catalog of rare material in England (Maggs, Quaritch, Sotheby’s), France (Morgand), Switzerland (Gilhofer und Ranschburg), Germany (Rosenthal), and Italy (Olschki). The most recent examples of these are lavishly produced, often with copious illustration, and provide scholarly information about editions, their provenance, and any points of rarity, which can help justify the eye-watering prices ascribed to the items. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, publishers’ catalogs also became more lavish: long descriptions, blurbs from authorities, and pictures were used to sell new as well as old books.
A final development of sales catalogs worth noting is their transformation into bibliographical reference tools. Already in the sixteenth century Conrad Gessner (1516–65) had noted the utility of lists of books available for a sale from a given printer, many of which he reproduced in the dedications to his Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XXI (Twenty-one books of pandects or general categories) of 1548–49. Later bibliographical authors followed suit, including Antonio Possevino (1533/4–1611) in compiling his Bibliotheca selecta (Select bibliography) (1593) for Catholic use, and Gabriel Naudé’s in authoring his advice on library building: Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Instructions concerning erecting of a library) (1627). Daniel Elzevier’s compendious bookshop catalog of 1674 appeared in Amsterdam, then a city on the way to becoming “the bookshop of the world.” It was almost immediately acquired as a bibliographical reference guide to the disciplines and subjects that it contained. Its purchasers no doubt settled down to peruse it studiously and fruitfully as an object in its own right, much in the spirit of Anatole France’s fictional scholar Silvestre Bonnard, for whom there was “no easier, more attractive and sweeter reading than a catalog.” Since the 1990s, this kind of entertainment has been provided by Amazon as well as many secondhand booksellers and has been available in vast quantities to anyone with a computer.
Ian Maclean
See also bibliography; books; censorship; commodification; digitization; inventories; libraries and catalogs; merchants; publicity/publication; readers; sales catalogs