The book market of the century between 1650 and 1750 is an unexpectedly fascinating object of study. The confessional conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War produced a structural winner: the nation-state that would come to dominate the modern era. The French crown aligned an entire country around itself – prompting the book market to respond by turning the heterogeneous, free Netherlands into the new hub of an international trade. French publishers in exile fuelled this market with works not published in France itself, works that found a critical and fashionable readership across Europe. In Rome and Venice, Corelli and Vivaldi made use of publishers such as Amsterdam’s Estienne Roger in order to reach this wider European audience.

Book historians – most of them trained in interpretive literary studies with their focus on nations and distinctive national developments – often experience the specialized field they enter as a counterworld. Concepts such as the »simultaneity of the non-simultaneous« govern literary historiography, and national corpora enter comparative debates, whereas historians of the book market must come to terms with what customers actually read, regardless of whether the texts were local or imported, new, old, or already classical.

The present collective volume, already in its title – which ignores century boundaries – sets aside epochal historiography. Its twelve contributions are grouped under three headings that primarily capture what booksellers and book collectors could actually do under the regulatory regimes they faced. The range is immediately colourful and multifaceted: it includes studies of the relationships between the Dutch book trade and apothecaries, physicians, and the advertising sections of newspapers (Jeroen Salman); of ABC primers sold in the bookshops of Catalonia (Xevi Camprubí); of a paradigmatic astronomical event as reported in scholarly journals (Doris Gruber); of the genesis of the first collected edition of Galileo’s works (Leonardo Anatrini); of the monitoring of book imports into the Spanish colonies (Alberto José Campillo Pardo and Idalia García); of the reach of the Protestant Nuremberg bookseller Rüdiger into the Prague market (Mona Garloff); of fictitious publisher imprints on French title pages (Dominique Varry); of parish libraries in England (Jessica G. Purdy); of English books in Danish libraries (Hanna de Lange); of auctioneers confronted with official efforts to control their business in Lübeck (Philippe Bernhard Schmidt); of classification systems in French private libraries (Helwi Blom); and, finally, of the presumably epochal status of Hans Sloane’s private library (Alexandra Ortolja-Baird).

Only the final contribution is guided by the question of how its subject fits into established period history, with its arcs from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Baroque to the Enlightenment. In most of the essays, the focus is on actors and the opportunities they could seize, with personal, confessional, private, and above all financial interests at stake. Privileges, prohibitions, and the interests of other market participants define the field in which they operate.

State and ecclesiastical authorities appear in almost all contributions in an ambivalent light. They issued strict laws and constructed bureaucratic structures that repeatedly produced baffling inventories: mass counts of books in bookstores, import lists in intercontinental book transport, catalogues that generate an unexpectedly rich body of data. Almost everywhere, however, these authorities prove – when viewed from the perspective of booksellers and their customers – to be paper tigers. Regulations are circumvented, information is falsified, and precarious titles are smuggled into lists in the confidence that spaces of freedom exist beyond the rules. Technical issues also come into view: in dealing with French book production, scholars long failed to grasp how little publisher imprints could be trusted. Today, indicators of actual production are being pursued through databases that capture the telltale details of book design.

The market environment creates compelling constellations of interest, such as that of the medical professions in the process of distinguishing themselves from quacks. Both groups used the book market to reach potential customers in shops. Heirs to libraries align with auctioneers around the shared interest of liquidating book collections in their entirety, discreetly and under the eyes of local censors. Individual networks of relationships prove unexpectedly resilient at the level of actors – capable of making the improbable possible, as in the reach of the Protestant Nuremberg bookseller into the Prague market.

History can also run counter to prevailing trends. When the Bourbons ascended the Spanish throne, a trend toward proactive literacy came to an end in the Catalan provinces. Previously, the ability to read and write had functioned as a ticket of entry into local public office; now that incentive was lost. History, in all these details, does not unfold as a line of interpretations connecting the peaks of epochal works. The picture that emerges is fragmented and disorienting, and it highlights what we do not know. We cannot really grasp what travellers experienced in bookshops across Europe – we cannot even draw the map. Was it easy for customers to distinguish between local and European goods? Was there a typical small-town assortment across Europe, distinct from that of the major cities? How exactly was it possible that titles such as Renneville’s French Bastille (1715) – with its insights into the illegal book trade between France and the Netherlands – were immediately available in translation in France, the Netherlands, England, and Germany, published with an eye to a contemporary European taste – and how far did that taste extend? In the present volume, Prague has become the outer edge. Warsaw or Palermo, Oslo or Belgrade remain beyond reach, even though aristocratic readers elsewhere were evidently capable of keeping pace with European fashions. Were peasants and craftsmen, at the same moment, embedded in their own canon of religious and popular literature, and how was that canon delimited? What we lack – and what this volume particularly highlights – is comprehensive research of the kind that already turns Lübeck and Prague into unfamiliar and, in every detail, historically curious terrain.