Journal dune génération anonyme (French Edition)

They reinforced their power by policing the trade in Paris—that is, by inspecting bookstores, printing shops, and the shipments of books that arrived at the city gates—and they often developed networks of client booksellers in the provinces. The Crown attempted to correct some of the disadvantages suffered by the provincial dealers in new regulations promulgated on August 30, , but it never succeeded in restoring much competition.

In the face of these constraints and costs, many authors and provincial publishers preferred to have their books produced outside France and to market them inside the kingdom while arranging for inspectors in the provinces to look the other way. Foreign publishers of French books had done a brisk business during the sixteenth century in order to satisfy the demand for Protestant works.

In the eighteenth century, they produced nearly all the works of the Enlightenment along with everything else that could not pass the censorship. But they made most of their money from piracy. The term was widely used at the time but may seem misleading, because publishers in Geneva or Amsterdam did not violate local laws by reprinting books that had originally appeared in Paris. No international copyright agreement existed. But when the foreign publishers sold their editions inside France, they aroused the fury of the owners of the original privileges, who were nearly always booksellers in the Parisian guild.

Authors could not sell books themselves before the reforms of and rarely did so afterward. The provincial booksellers, by contrast, were natural allies of the foreign publishers, primarily because of economic factors. They usually could procure pirated books at lower prices than the originals, which had to be produced according to quality standards set by royal regulations. Conditions varied, but paper, which represented half or more of production costs depending on the size of the pressrun, was often cheaper outside France.

They reprinted books that were selling well, according to reports from their Parisian agents and provincial retailers, and they did not have to advance capital to purchase the original manuscripts from the authors. True, they needed to have their books smuggled into France, but they could count on allies among the booksellers who inspected shipments in distribution centers like Rouen and Lyon.

Despite occasional breakdowns, the illegal distribution system supplied relatively inexpensive books to a broad public everywhere in provincial France. It outdid the upscale, Paris-centered, and guild-based system in linking production to demand. How to measure demand? The enormous collection of STN documents reveals literary demand in two ways: Rich as it is, the material comes almost entirely from one source, and therefore any user of the website is bound to question the representativeness of the STN archives.

No comparable source exists. In contrast, the statistics given in the website cover books of all kinds—that is, all the works that circulated in the French market during the twenty years before the Revolution. As an index to the overall market, it can only be approximate; but the STN archives, which contain about 50, letters, are rich enough to provide an adequate sample of the demand for books as it was expressed in the correspondence of booksellers located nearly everywhere in France. In order to appreciate the importance of this evidence, it is necessary to understand two factors that characterized Swiss-French publishing in the eighteenth century: Both illustrate crucial aspects of early modern publishing that distinguish it from publishing today.

The STN rarely published original editions, unless it was commissioned to do so by authors who covered the costs. In choosing them, it studied the market carefully and followed advice that it received from the best-informed booksellers in its vast network of clients. But it did not sell only the books that it produced in its own printing shop.

When it printed an edition, usually at a run of about 1, copies, it commonly traded a large proportion— or more copies—for an assortment of an equal number of books in the stock of one or more allied publishers. Exchanges were usually calculated according to the total number of sheets involved in the trade; and when the STN selected an assortment, it chose the books that it thought would sell best.

In this way, it maximized the value and variety of its stock, and at the same time it minimized risk, because it could not be sure that an edition it printed would sell out or would sell rapidly enough to cover the investment of its capital. When a bookseller ordered a work that it did not have in stock, the STN often procured it by an ad hoc trade or a discount purchase with an allied publisher in Lausanne, Geneva, Bern, or Basel that operated in the same manner. The importance of exchanges in this publishing system has never been noted by historians except in the case of Germany, where it functioned as the primary means of marketing books until the late eighteenth century.

Of course, the Swiss publishers often competed, but they also created alliances, which reinforced the links created by the exchange trade. Sometimes they published books together, sharing costs and risks. Joint publications were especially effective in speculations on pirated editions, when it was crucial to beat other pirates to the market before the demand dried up. The swapping and pirating arrangements meant that the STN built up a large and varied stock of books, but some were more important than others in the general pattern of its trade.

It sold more copies of books that it had printed than it did of books that it procured by exchanges. In order to avoid misleading comparisons, the titles of the STN editions are set off in the statistical tables of the website by colored fonts, and the lists of books most in demand are given in two forms: In each case, the statistical base is strong enough to support general conclusions, because the overall stock of the STN grew to be enormous by the mids.

The broad range of the books supplied by the STN was in part a response to the way booksellers placed orders for them. The STN sent catalogs and prospectuses to hundreds of dealers. Most of them, attracted by a particular title or curious to try out the services of a new supplier, ordered only a few works and never developed regular commercial relations. While dealing with these transitory customers as occasions arose, the STN built up its own network of regular clients.

They often arranged sales in advance with their own customers before committing themselves to purchase books from a foreign supplier; and rather than scattering orders among many suppliers, they usually restricted their trade to a few reliable houses. They tended to wait until they had accumulated enough items to group them in a single order.

But they did not speculate on large shipments of one work unless they detected an unusual surge of demand. Instead, they ordered small numbers of several different books and later sent in new orders for those that continued to sell. Therefore, booksellers rarely ordered more than a dozen copies of a single title by ordering a dozen they sometimes got a free thirteenth and ordered enough titles to form a shipment large enough for them to take advantage of cheaper rates.

Books were shipped unbound in bundles of sheets packed into bales; binding was normally arranged by individual customers and sometimes by retail booksellers. The distinction between the wagon voiture and the coach carrosse was crucial in the book trade, because books had relatively low intrinsic value in relation to shipping costs. Also, the recipient normally had to pay for them in cash upon delivery. The letters of booksellers read like an endless wail about the cost of shipping. Instead of dispersing their business among many suppliers, therefore, they often concentrated it among a few that they could trust.

Trust confiance was a key term in the long-distance book trade and probably in early capitalism everywhere , owing to the need to avoid cheating. The tricks of the trade could be exploited endlessly by entrepreneurs who operated far away from the home territory of their victims. And they often played favorites with their shipments so that some booksellers creamed off the demand before others in the same area received their copies.

Either way, the accumulation of orders makes it possible to form a general idea of the business of a bookseller who traded regularly with the STN. I emphasize this point because it bears on a critical decision about the best method for compiling statistics. It would be possible to work through all the accounts of the STN beautifully kept registers called journaux , brouillards , and mains courantes and to record the sale of every book to every customer.

It raised the prospect of tracing the diffusion of French literature everywhere in Europe. But closer examination showed that the results would be misleading. Although the STN corresponded with hundreds of booksellers located everywhere from Moscow to Naples and from Budapest to Dublin, most of its correspondents belonged to the class of transitory customers.

They placed very few orders—often only one or two, par essai , as they put it. Therefore, the STN often sold only a few copies of a particular book in a large area or an entire country, and the small number of copies that it managed to sell cannot be taken to typify the diffusion of that book or the trade of the bookseller who bought it.

The irregular, hit-and-miss quality of the sales records makes it misleading to lump all of the sales together in an attempt to generalize about the dissemination of literature. Also, unfortunately, the data are too thin for one to reach conclusions about the general character of large markets such as Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, England, and Germany.

Can one conclude that the demand for Candide was greater in Russia than in all those other countries and that it had ceased to exist in most of western Europe during the years —89? Certainly not, because booksellers in those countries drew supplies from other publishers and wholesalers.

What the accounts do reveal is an extensive trade, by sales as well as exchanges, between the STN and other Swiss houses, who then sold its books within their own commercial networks. I see no way around a disappointing conclusion: One attempt to follow this procedure, an online work entitled The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe, — , commits these and other errors.

Although it contains some useful maps and bibliographical information, it does not succeed in studying diffusion. To gauge the extent to which the orders of a bookseller can be taken to represent his business, it is necessary to compile an adequate number of them and also to read the letters in which they appear. Only by careful study of the correspondence can one determine the context of the sales, the conditions that determined their limits, and the nature of the rapport between customer and supplier. Far from restricting themselves to business, their commercial correspondence then opens up a fresh view of life in provincial France, because in some cases one can follow a bookseller from the time he sets up shop to when he gets married, develops a family, takes sick, and dies.

Letters from neighbors and other merchants complete the picture. For all their homeliness—in fact, because of it—the letters make fascinating reading. Hundreds of them can be sampled on the website. Only a small minority of the thousands of dossiers in the STN archives offer such a rich view. The richness of this documentation complements the correspondence of the booksellers themselves. Therefore, it is possible to compare a horizontal view of the trade in with a vertical perspective derived from letters that stretch from to By combining quantitative analysis with a critical reading of the correspondence, it is possible to make inferences about the sale of as well as the demand for books.

In fact, the orders of the eighteen booksellers correspond quite closely to the books they actually received. In general, however, the STN often failed to supply some of the books ordered by a customer, either because it did not have them in stock or because it could not procure them from other publisher-wholesalers.

But in the records of the eighteen booksellers, the match between the orders and the sales was usually very close, and therefore the statistics can be taken as a rough measure of the diffusion of books as well as a more accurate picture of the demand for them. This argument may be convincing as far as it goes, but does it go far enough to support sound conclusions?

In some cases, the statistical base may be dangerously thin. Among the eighteen booksellers in the sample, Constantin Lair of Blois ordered the smallest number of books—only thirty-four titles in all. He was a schoolmaster and small-time vintner who sold books as a sideline, but his letters indicate that he depended on the STN for most of his supplies. Despite the modest size of his orders, I have therefore included him in the sample to illustrate the business of a marginal dealer in the capillary sector of the book trade.

Allen Lane, the rascally twenty-four-year-old secretary of the Bodley Head and one of its directors, was keen on publication, and his fellow directors were eager to encourage him. Pearson named the real diplomat Sir Rennell Rodd, who, promptly visited by Lane, denied having had anything to do with the book. To avoid persecution, The Bodley Head declared themselves victims of a fraud. They withdrew the book from publication and charged Pearson with seeking to profit on false pretenses.

The Bodley Head, who had probably suspected the prank long ago and then turned on their lucrative author, gave Pearson his due royalties. The outraged reaction to The Whispering Gallery was not so much because of its anonymity—a justifiable discretion had the accounts been true—as because it billed maligning fantasy as fact. Here both author and content were a pretense; perhaps the public could tolerate only a single fiction. Some authors used several pseudonyms to distinguish among several genres. Marie Carmichael Stopes, for example, signed her legal name to her works on botany, birth control, and eugenics, but, to banish associations with the controversial author of Married Love , assumed pseudonyms for her literary work: She may have convinced herself that she wanted to testify to sympathy across cultures: The love affair over, she sought to make public and permanent a private joy that had since fled.

Many early twentieth-century writers chose anonymity for reasons of family pride. For instance, Edmund Gosse published the memoir Father and Son without a name because he feared seeming cruel in detailing the cruelty of his long-dead father, and feared too seeming to want to have the last word. Elizabeth von Arnim signed Elizabeth and her German Garden without a name, to avoid sullying her status as a Prussian countess with this semi-fictionalized diary received by some reviewers as a novel.

Derniers numéros

In von Arnim adopted a pseudonym for the first and only time, signing as Alice Cholmondeley Christine , a novel presented as real letters from a British daughter in war-torn Germany to her mother in England. Christine is the daughter, Alice her mother and the editor of the letters. Finally, in von Arnim signed without a name the autobiographical novel In the Mountains , for fear of being sued by Francis Russell, her second husband, from whom she was separated: She also adopted additional pseudonyms for additional purposes.

For example, she published without a name War Nurse: Modesty, sometimes religiously inflected, continued to prompt the withholding of signature. Although this Gossean gesture did much to betray her anonymity, Champneys was alarmed when her local library rebound her books with her family name on the spine. However halfheartedly she concealed her identity, modesty and Anglican piety seem to have numbered among her multiple reasons for doing so. A male pseudonym aligns the author with the authors of the gospels, including that original John, and also, as she knew well, added authority.

1. The Demand for Literature in France, –, a… – Mémoires du livre – Érudit?
2. Fetish Hospital: Matrons Double Anal.
3. !
4. Breadcrumb?
5. !
6. .

Unusually frank about its modesty-inspired anonymity is the book Anonymous: This memoir of late Victorian writers and theater professionals includes a one-page preface explaining,. In my young days I was for ever denouncing the custom of anonymous criticisms, and now I send out my recollections in that guise. Besides, what self have I to advertise? Chance threw me into the company of artists, authors, actors [.

The back matter advertising the book is at odds with this explanation: The latter was easily solved: She is Agnes Platt, author of several guides to acting, for theater and cinema. The amount of speculation proves the contemporary rarity of elusive female authorship if indeed Ferrante is a woman. In the early twentieth century, protection from opprobrium remained a motive for marginalized groups, among which women came to count less firmly.

Women had fewer motives for publishing anonymously as they gained the vote, joined the work force, and in other ways found civil protection.

Speculating on the decline of anonymity, Robert J. For example, Christopher St. John the name Christabel Gertrude Marshall took when she converted to Catholicism published without a name her second novel, Hungerheart: One thinks also of Dorothy Bussy, whose autobiographical novel featured a Duncan Grant cover on which the Place de la Concorde is sandwiched between large block letters reading Olivia above and By Olivia below. The law had not caught up to the market for literature on homosexuality. This disjunction had been made clear when, in , Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison for sodomy.

He published one more work before he died in , The Ballad of Reading Gaol , which he signed as C. His authorship was an open secret, but publishing under this metonym prevented libel action by prison officials. Outside of Britain, other groups, too, had reason to withhold signature. Europe under Hitler saw anonymous autobiographical accounts such as the unsigned Refugee: African-American writers who wrote of passing as white had cause to conceal their work from those they knew. Here we recall Pearson, Gosse, von Arnim, and—with less cause—Platt. If an author wants to protect his extra-textual life from scrutiny, there must be a reason worth reading about.

To maintain distinct authorial personae, to gain financially, to defend against a hostile reception, to guard or assuage loved ones, to act modestly, and to seek asylum for voicing radical or risky views—these are the usual motives for anonymity in the early twentieth century. We have considered titles published between and by fifteen British writers, two American, and one German. This data helps us answer the three questions with which I opened this essay, even as conclusions drawn from this small sample of Anons are necessarily provisional.

In the early twentieth century, did anonymity continue to appeal to women writers as women writers? Before the twentieth century, women had three major reasons to publish anonymously, as noted above: Only the latter seems to have held wide continued appeal. In the early twentieth-century, humility ceased to be a prominent female virtue, and the stigma of print, which had affected aristocrats as well as women, faded. Women, including aristocratic women, felt more free to sign their names. One thinks, for instance, of Vita Sackville-West, and surmises that von Arnim, a fellow designer of gardens, might have signed her full name to Elizabeth and her German Garden had she not been a Countess living in late nineteenth-century Germany.

Champneys, Underhill, and occasional others still harbored the desire to be modest, but those who affirmed that they chose anonymity out of modesty, such as Platt, sounded obtuse, unable to judge their era or their reader. But the camps seeking protection, or negative liberty, shifted as women gained protection elsewhere and publishing welcomed once-obscured voices e. As for gaining a hearing: In the s Robins took the sexless name C. Raimond so that her readers would not identify her with her protagonists, much like Browning and Tennyson leaving their names off their early work.

For Allatini, the ambiguous gender of A. Without venturing into gender essentialism are women more likely to want to protect family members? My sampling of authors includes more women than men, but this is only because it is easier to find anonymous twentieth-century women writers, thanks to endeavors such as the Orlando Project. This signals one triumph of feminist scholarship: At this time, which genre or genres particularly lacked signature? Overwhelmingly, the genre most likely to be signed anonymously was autobiography, in all its forms.

Perhaps the decline in anonymity and the growth in autobiography are proofs of the same trend, a move towards exposure. Today, Elena Ferrante and her uncommon kind notwithstanding, autobiography tends to be signed. Khan turned out to be the pseudonym of Reverend Toby Forward, a white male Anglican priest.

Menu principal

On his outing, Forward pleaded to an outraged public that he was bringing the problems of a minority population to greater attention. But the public was unappeased, and Virago pulled the book from the market. Once, we drove women and minorities to seek protection and power in a withheld or invented name; for this sin, and for glutting ourselves on autobiography, Rahila Khan and similar hoaxes serve as penance. But the complicity of anonymity and autobiography genuine or not has long characterized much British fiction.

What is distinct about the early twentieth century is the coincidence of waxing autobiography and waning anonymity. What can strict anonymity offer that pseudonymity cannot? But in the late nineteenth century and after, as pseudonymity displaced strict anonymity, authors who chose the latter usually had an excellent reason for calling attention to their self-effacement. Isolating the justifications for strict anonymity helps clarify why it now trails behind pseudonymity, and why in rare cases it has persisted. The reason for strict anonymity is sometimes the same as that for publishing anonymously at all, but usually it is the result of a secondary consideration—the author has decided to withhold signature for X reason, and then must choose a particular form of anonymity for Y reason.

As with the first decision, the second too may have more than one cause. Neither strict anonymity nor pseudonymity prohibits branding: Nor, following from this, is one approach necessarily more remunerative than the other: Champneys as for advertised pseudonymity e. Instead, the following six reasons for strict anonymity suggest themselves: To illustrate these reasons, I draw not only on the works we have surveyed published between and , but also on works published earlier and later.

The first reason, to avoid standing out from the mass, appealed when anonymous publication was common, from the dawn of print to the late nineteenth century. And it appeals again today, but the platforms have shifted: Platt gives the impression of having chosen anonymity for this reason, but in modesty-inspired anonymity was distinctly not conventional, and thus it branded her. In the early twentieth century, when periodical pieces were generally signed and the Internet had not yet been born, the wish to blend into the mass rarely applied. John no name , the author of Refugee no name , and James Weldon Johnson Anonymous were all driven by this reason.

Gosse, Robins, and Refugee sensed risk; St.

Navigation

John and Johnson sensed both risk and shame. A century earlier, Anonyma managed a similar slippage between author and protagonist, and here the lack of signature likewise implied the disgrace of the prostitute who shares her name with the book in which she features. Published around the time as Anonyma and its sequels, and just as popular, was the unsigned erotic novel The Autobiography of a Flea , where the viewpoint of an insignificant insect, that of a perverse, vastly shrunken God, facilitates seeing and touching all without being seen. A phraseonym could also emphasize shameful content e.

A phraseonym or significant pseudonym would be even less appropriate for works whose publication carries risk, such as autobiographical accounts of mental illness. Here strict anonymity both protects and advertises in equal measure; a pseudonym protects but does not advertise. The second edition of the material book, like the organization to which it is adjunct, invites the reader to join the author in his flaunted anonymity: It has been especially designed for your convenience.

But here too, making an exhibition of the wish to be unknown defeats the attempt. Reading a book with a blank dustjacket, alas, looks much like drinking something wrapped in a paper bag. His Birth and Other Misfortunes satirizes British hypocrisy by way of the sorry saga of an unnamed Westminster child abandoned by his impoverished parents.

L’armée de l’an II : la levée en masse et la création d’un mythe républicain

The nuns rescue him for a moment and dub him Ambrosius, but after they quarrel over him with the Protestants, they return the baby to his family. The Ginxes soon unburden themselves again. Ambrosius, remote from the gods despite his name, grows to a child. Unsigned on publication, the book became an extraordinary best seller and had the intended effect of spurring social reform and the unintended effect of spurring reform of Canadian Copyright law.

Again the lack of signature signifies. We are less concerned today with orphans and journalistic anonymity, but social isolation, anonymous hacktivists, and cults founded upon mysteriously authored texts should supply the necessary fodder. Where an author wants to subsume his identity into that of the group whose case he advances, he might use the phraseonym of a representative member. For his time, Gillet was anomalous: As with the parading of shame, here too strict anonymity has pulled ahead of the mustier device. The suggestion of group authorship lends weight to the cause.

Signing as Anonymous not only called attention to her risk, but also conjured up the whole feminist movement behind her. The fifth enduring reason for strict anonymity is that one has no choice. Such was arguably the case for Hesketh Pearson, given that he wanted to present The Whispering Gallery as nonfiction. Though to Allen Lane he credited a real diplomat as author in order to guarantee the truth of the work, to the public he credited only an unnamed Ex-Diplomat, a mystery that itself momentarily guaranteed the truth. A case in more recent memory is that of Joe Klein, political journalist and author of Primary Colors: But only a Washington insider, from a limited pool of candidates, could have written the account, and no Washington insider, one would have thought, could claim both authorship and a steady paycheck.

He landed softly in December at The New Yorker. A Presidential Novel , signed by Anonymous. This claim initially fueled speculation and sales, but both were dampened by marketing missteps and aesthetic flaws.

• Anon is Not Dead: Towards a History of Anonymou – Mémoires du livre – Érudit?
• Little Miss Joy.
• Il braccio destro (Contemporanea) (Italian Edition)!
• Fil d'Ariane!
• .

Such writers are often responsible for political speeches, celebrity memoirs, pop songs, and web content—including the Abebooks. Ghostwriters trade on the generic tone of their creations; in some ways they are the modern counterparts to wandering minstrels, peddlers of formulaic paeans and plaints. The sixth reason for strict anonymity, to imply that a work exists ex nihilo , hints at an authorial power that exceeds the single human body implied by a name. Not signing at all serves here better than signing as Anonymous, because the latter stands in for a name while the former ignores the possibility of unique human authorship.

This reason moved Tennyson to put no name on In Memoriam , his epic elegy on his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, dead at age twenty-two. The cantos in ABBA tetrameter quatrains draw the audience into a universal effort at self-steadying. By implying that In Memoriam could have been written by anyone, Tennyson also implied that it could have been written by everyone. Some authors choose strict anonymity to imply that the text was written by no one , or at least no one human.

These authors wish to convey the same omnipotence as God, anonymous in the Hebrew and Christian bibles. Only one of the strictly anonymous writers I have considered was not obviously motivated by one of these six reasons: Champneys, writing as Anonymous. Though she may have withheld her name in part out of modesty, like Platt, she knew better than Platt that she would not therefore blend into the crowd. I have found no satisfying explanation of why Champneys did not sign with a pseudonym. Among our fifteen British authors publishing books anonymously between and I exclude the two Americans and one German for standardization , three signed as Anonymous Robins, Champneys, Platt , one signed with no name and arguably hinted at none St.

The total is more than fifteen because some of our authors von Arnim, Robins, Sassoon, Fairfield achieved anonymity in multiple ways. Of this small sample, no single approach to signing predominates. But I would venture that given more data, we would see that among anonymous publications that is, excluding Internet forums , and especially among books as opposed to periodicals , the percentage of pseudonymous texts grows greater and greater with each decade of the twentieth century. For the genuinely modest or guarded, a subtle pseudonym provokes no suspicion.

And what was true in T. It is strict anonymity that especially appealed to the imagination of British modernist writers, who nurtured a nostalgia for balladeers and church-builders and their supposed unconcern for their names. The decline of practiced anonymity seems to have stimulated desired anonymity and the prizing of anonymity as an aesthetic ideal. In her admiration for Anon, Woolf was in the company of W. While these writers longed for a community that would respect unsigned art, and even adopt it as their own expression, T. Eliot and the New Critics were promoting an authorial ideal of impersonality, a metaphorical anonymity.

Understanding actual anonymity would contextualize this ideal, perhaps a displacement of publishing conditions onto aesthetic conditions. The marketplace importuned for relics of its authors, even as these authors aspired to be disembodied.



We are not satisfied with his or her. Anon did not die in , as Woolf lamented, nor in Though he is not what he once was, he is not likely ever to die. Bringing the early twentieth-century Anon out of obscurity will shed light also on publishing history, autobiography, marginalized writers, and the central aesthetic of modernism. Towards a History of Anonymous Authorship Abstracts Abstract In , Virginia Woolf blamed the printing press for killing the oral tradition that had promoted authorial anonymity: This memoir of late Victorian writers and theater professionals includes a one-page preface explaining, In my young days I was for ever denouncing the custom of anonymous criticisms, and now I send out my recollections in that guise.

Appendices Footnotes [1] For their helpful and encouraging responses to earlier versions of this piece, I thank Robert J.