The EMoBookTrade project studied the development of the early modern European print market using unexplored evidence. To fulfill this goal, the project has focused on a reconstruction of the economic history of publishing and bookselling. The project has addressed some crucial questions related to book prices and the States’ controlled dynamics of political economy in the publishing sector. The team has developed a thorough case study based on the path breaking politics of book privileges initiated by Venice and also produced scholarship for other Italian states. Moreover, to consolidate the knowledge on early modern management of the bookselling business, a set of case studies were narrowed down by focusing on two major cities in the European book trade, Venice and Antwerp. For the former the activity of publisher and bookseller B. Giunti was singled out and for the latter the firm of C. Plantin and J. Moretus was chosen. Lastly, to expand our knowledge on the technique of building and managing a transnational network for book distribution and sale, attention has been given to some groundbreaking evidence represented by an entire year of correspondence of a Venetian bookseller, G. B. Gabiano.
The project created a hitherto non-existent but utterly productive research field at the junction between book history and economic history. To do so, both an innovative methodology and ground-breaking research tools were developed to process sizeable commercial and legal documents pertaining to the European book trade in the 16th–17th centuries. This resulted in two online research databases containing (1) circa 33,000 book prices derived from 73 sources from major European firms (including Plantin, Giunti, Giolito, Manuzio, Morel, Estienne, Feyerabend), in 10 different currencies and (2) 5,300 Venetian book privileges issued between 1469 and 1603.
The developed methodology links commercial data with intricate bibliographic data to establish book prices, which are in turn recalculated into synchronically and diachronically comparable value, i.e. Lire Veneziane and grams of silver.
The analysis of these data and business documents has shed light on (1) contemporary pricing policies of publishers and booksellers, (2) their continuous seeking of protection through book privileges, (3) the settlement and organization of transnational distribution networks (e.g. Gabiano), (4) the morphology of publishing firms (e.g. Gabiano, Giunti), and (5) the nature of previously unknown benchmarking tools used to monitor wide ranging spaces of the book market in order to assess potential risks and opportunities (i.e. Giunti, Plantin).
The methodology, the research tools, and the surveys conducted by the team were disseminated in the context of 15 international conferences, as well as in an array of invited lectures, seminars and workshops held in Europe, the UK, the USA and Canada. The team produced 3 monographs, 8 peer-reviewed edited volumes and 35 peer-reviewed articles or book chapters, all in gold open access.
