Darnton looks mainly at the publishers surrounding France and how they carved out a living without copyright and often under threat of censorship (sometimes for the political works they published, sometimes for the sexy books). They also lived without much money—there were lots of debts and promises, but very little specie and no government-backed paper, which complicated matters a lot as they tried to make a living in trade. Their interactions and unauthorized dissemination of works, he suggests, were significant in spreading the Enlightenment: with some notable exceptions, nearly all the works of the French Enlightenment were published outside France and smuggled back in. (Hostility to legally enforced “privilege” thus permeated the books both in content and in practice.) He estimates that half the standard books in the crucial period leading up to the French Revolution were pirated in this way, making piracy crucial to the history of ideas. It was a hard life—lots of bankruptcies (which meant flight or debtor’s prison in those days), occasional arrests, lots of authors commissioning print runs and then failing to pay the bills. But by making books available to the literate middling classes—lawyers, doctors, state officials—they contributed to fundamental changes in French society. Since they competed with each other to sell whatever would sell, they had to try to stay ahead of demand and sometimes engaged in false advertising about their own plans to warn others off.

One of the most fascinating tidbits: As the system creaked under strain, censors began giving private approval to printing, until privately approved texts represented 30% of printed books. The approval remained secret and the books would usually indicate they’d been printed outside of France even if they’d been printed in Paris; if they became controversial, they could be withdrawn without a fuss. Also, booksellers who trafficked in unapproved texts were known as marrons, a term also applied to fugitive slaves in the colonies. And people saved a perhaps surprising number of letters discussing their shenanigans, even ones marked “tear this up right away.” ( )