The case for books: past, present and future

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.