Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Bookseller of the Enlightenment

Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Bookseller of the EnlightenmentAwarded with the menno hertzberger prize

AFdH Uitgevers / AFdH Publishers

Praise for Rietje van Vliet’s

biography on

Elie Luzac (1721-1796)

In her lucidly written book-historical study which bears witness to an im-

pressive erudition, Rietje van Vliet’s chief focus of interest is to reconstruct

the nature of Luzac’s publishing business. [...] The work offers the reader

a fascinating and broad panorama of the book trade and its functions in

eighteenth-century Dutch society.

Prof. dr. Wyger R.E. Velema, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review

Elie Luzac has been awarded his rightful place in a most impressive way.

[...] The reader learns a lot about the European, specifically Dutch book

trade, about Luzac’s own company, his business strategies, his political

views and the relationship between publishers and authors.

Dr. Roelof van Gelder, NRC Handelsblad

The celebrated eighteenth-century publisher Elie Luzac [...] embodied what

must still remain a dream for any academic writer. He was a thinker among

thinkers, and he showed what he was capable of in a constant stream of

pamphlets. Needless to say, the authorities did not always take kindly to

his efforts.

Prof. dr. Ger Groot, De Groene Amsterdammer

This well-researched, lively and very detailed account of the life, career

and ideas of Elie Luzac, one of the most important and interesting

representatives of “conservative Enlightenment” in the eighteenth-century

Dutch Republic is definitely to be welcomed. [...] To the existing picture

of Elie Luzac, Rietje van Vliet now adds a good deal of additional detail,

especially about the man, his family, and his publishing business, much

of it painstakingly gathered from unpublished archival sources.

Prof. Jonathan Israel Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman


Famous and infamous: the story of an eighteenth-century Dutch publisher

The Leiden bookseller and publisher Elie Luzac (1721-1796) had a vast European network. The way in which Luzac operated in this network of professional relationships sheds illuminating light on the international book trade of the eighteenth century. Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Bookseller of the Enlightenment is a work that puts developments in today’s publishing world in a new perspective. Book historian Rietje van Vliet’s award- winning biography of the single-minded publisher Luzac is now available in an English translation for non-Dutch historians, bibliophiles and readers with a marked interest in the Enlightenment.


‘Elie Luzac: the last major Dutch publisher with a European outlook’

Rietje van Vliet received her doctorate presenting a biography of the Leiden bookseller and publisher Elie Luzac (1721-1796) some years ago. As an independent researcher she publishes regularly on various aspects of the Dutch book trade in the early modern period. Her biography won the prestigious Menno Hertzberger Prize: ‘an excellent example of the modern approach to book history’. The English-language edition of her book has now been published by afdh Publishers.

Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Bookseller of the Enlightenment is a thorough book historical study of well over 330 pages. However, an interview with Rietje van Vliet (1954) on the subject of her study never gets bogged down in academic jargon. She talks about Luzac, his business and his times with lively enthusiasm. ‘He was forever reading and entering | into debates but he also cut a great figure on the dance floor and on the ice rink.’ She laughs as she recalls how one of the reviewers of her book objected to her use of the word ‘love child’. ‘It’s a very nice word and it’s obvious what is meant’, says van Vliet, ‘and after all, it really was Luzac’s love child. So why would a word like that have no right to appear in a dissertation?’

interview with rietje van vliet


The Commentarii Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis was an academic

journal issued by the venerable Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. Luzac only

served briefly as the publisher of this renowned periodical. His conflict with the

academic community in Göttingen eventually reached such a crisis that it took

years of legal battles to wrap up their business relationship. Luzac wanted nothing

more to do with Germany in future. He had already rejected the offer of Frederick

the Great to become the King’s court supplier and publisher in Berlin. Now he

also stopped his regular visits to the Leipzig Book Fair. Luzac is one of the last

Dutch publishers of French-language books to have been active in Germany in

the eighteenth century.


The emergence of separate functions in the book trade

In the early modern period, printers, publishers and booksellers each played their own clearly defined roles. These separate functions were gradually abolished in the course of the eighteenth century, a development which was almost completed by the end of the century. In the twenty-first century, we see an opposite trend taking place. The separation of functions is disappea-ring now that publishers are opening on-line shops and are doubling as booksellers. Writers, too, are able to publish and sell their own books. On top of this, the traditional autonomy of publishers is under attack now that bookselling giants like Amazon have secured a dominant position in the book market due to their global networks.


An enlightened conservative

Elie Luzac published more than 200,000 pages in print. When he brought out the highly inflammatory L’Homme Machine, it was out of deep conviction but also with a keen sense of profit. The work was subse-quently burnt, and its publisher put on trial. Luzac was eventually fined 2,000 guilders, the equivalent of 35,000 Euro. In other books, Luzac confronted Rousseau with a heated polemic. To the last of his life, he defended the claims of the House of Orange, in a climate of mounting patriotism, in the Dutch Republic. By all rights he can be called an en-lightened conservative bookseller and a philosophe. Van Vliet’s book is a passionate story about Elie Luzac’s life and the place of the Dutch book trade in the national and European context in the years 1750-1800.

Networker

‘Dutch publishers were able to dominate the European book markets for decades on end’, Rietje van Vliet says. This was already the case in the seventeenth century. In the following century too the sky seemed to be the limit when it came to the foreign market. The Dutch became ‘the brokers of our ideas’, as Luzac wrote in his Hollands rijkdom. He himself was convinced that conditions in the Dutch Republic were ideal for the role the book trade had to play; there were many internatio-nally acclaimed scholars working in the Republic, the quality of the printing was high and the prices relatively low, and there was freedom of the press. Luzac was a highly successful networker, especially in such countries as Germany and France, and his business thrived as a result. This flourishing situation in the Republic changed around 1760, van Vliet remarks, when Dutch publishers began to lose their competitive edge in the West-European book trade. Instead, they began to focus on the domestic market. ‘This is also clear from what Luzac published in those days. From that time on, he mostly brought out works dealing with strictly national issues. He never stopped publishing books that expressed his political republican ideals, or works on freedom of thinking and acting. But towards the end of his life, the spirit of the time had caught up with him.’


The publisher as a peer reviewer

No academic writer can survive without a publisher, now as much as in Luzac’s time. He was known and celebrated as a scholarly publisher and everybody wanted to be published by him. ‘Luzac was a sharp thinker and debater, as appears from his correspondence with a man like Jean Henri Formey, the learned secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Luzac read all his manuscripts, and he also reviewed and edited them for Formey. As an editor he was as imperious as he felt was necessary. A peer reviewer avant la lettre, I suppose you might call him.’

No author’s rights but copyright

Still a young man, Luzac already ran a publishing, printing and bookselling firm on Leiden’s highly exclusive Rapenburg. From there he built up a vast network that came to include almost every Enlighten-ment author who meant anything. Van Vliet: ‘They liked to have him as their publisher, even if he put a pirated edition of their work on the market. There was no such thing as author’s rights, even though a publisher could lay claim to some form of copyright. Beyond provincial or national borders, books were, you might say, a free-for-all commodity, and anyone could pirate them. It was a lucrative trade for the publisher, but the customers also benefited, because pirated editions kept prices sharp.’ Luzac’s own publishing list also includes pirated editions. He was quick to cash in, for instance on a blazing row between his friend Samuel König and the uncrowned Berlin bully Maupertuis about the latter’s unashamed plagiary of Leibniz: ‘The Leiden publisher brought out a volley of König’s accusatory essays and Voltaire’s malicious attacks, but he also printed pirated editions of the work of Maupertuis. Three men who would happily drink each other’s blood, forced to coexist on one and the same publisher’s list.’


La Mettrie’s notoriously famous L’Homme Machine was not the only edition

with which Luzac defied the Church and the government. Charles Bonnet,

another author on Luzac’s list, studied worms and maggots that appeared

to have been generated spontaneously from lifeless matter, as if God had

had nothing to do with it. Naturally this went against the biblical or

orthodox grain. The work was suspected of being Spinozistic. Luzac, however,

shrugged off such criticism. He felt strongly about the freedom of scholars

and scientists to write what they wanted, provided they offered solid

arguments. Generatio spontanea, therefore, was a scientific theory amply

represented in Luzac’s list; for instance, Bonnet’s Recherches sur l’Usage

des Feuilles dans les Plantes (1754).


Government intervention

The main factor for success in the book trade, however, has always remained the same: publishing and selling high-profile books by authors exploring the limits of what is permissible. Elie Luzac believed anything could be expressed in speech and writing as long as it was underpinned by rational argument. He cultivated an unfailing instinct for the potential bestseller in the process. It also repeatedly got him into trouble with the authorities, who were eager to clamp down on seditious thought by imposing censorship measures. Although government control of the press and the media has declined in the West in the past centuries, after the events of 9/11 there would appear to be an opposite trend in this respect, with governments increasingly turning to censorship measures in a bid to curb societal unrest.


The Leipzig Book Fair

In the first stages of his career, Luzac tried setting up an international network together with the Amsterdam bookseller Marc-Michel Rey, a bookdealer pur sang, but not a scholar like Luzac. Rey had excellent contacts in France, Luzac in Germany. It explains why they decided to enter into a partnership, Luzac’s biographer thinks: ‘Together they were able to cover the larger part of the West-European market. But then they fell out. Rey was a bit casual about things, while Luzac was a stickler for detail. In the 1750s Luzac regularly visited the Leipzig Book Fair, taking his own books with him. In those years Leipzig was the intellectual hub of Europe, attracting dealers from both Western and Eastern Europe. By that time only one percent of them came from the Dutch Republic.’

Top publisher

‘Why is it important to have a biography of Luzac available in English? Because Luzac was a person who mattered internationally. All the big names of the eighteenth century knew who he was: Voltaire, Montes- quieu, Rousseau, Haller, Catharine the Great, Frederick the Great. Luzac was a politically committed publisher right from the start and he corres-ponded with many of the great scholars and scientists of his day. I think Luzac was a top publisher. You didn’t go to Luzac for novels or books of poetry, but you were never disappointed if you wanted to read the latest works on philosophy, political theory or jurisprudence. He was keenly aware of the hot issues dominating the intellectual debate. Nor did he have any problem with views that skirted the borders of the permissible, as long as they were well argued.’ Van Vliet points to La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine as a case in point. The French physician and philosop-her wrote this work in 1747 in Leiden, where he had found refuge. ‘La Mettrie did not only deny the existence of the immortal soul but also implicitly questioned the validity of religion. The book caused a furor and the author was forced to leave Holland overnight. It was an incendi-ary and dangerous book to publish, but Luzac rose to the occasion.’


Learning from Luzac

Luzac himself authored a large number of the works on his list. ‘He was very strong analytically and verbally. An opinion-maker with a single mission, which was to prove that the Republic was a hundred times better off with a hereditary stadtholder than with the Regents’ faction in power.’ Van Vliet hesitates which opinion-maker today compares with Luzac. Al Gore or Joschka Fischer? Guy Verhofstadt? ‘Luzac has a pungent style of writing. His work is proof of his great erudition. It’s often impossible to contradict. Many of his contemporaries hated him for it, because he just wasn’t prepared to compromise or give in. He was simply always right and never wrong.’ He was just as headstrong as a publisher and bookseller. ‘Publishers nowadays can learn a thing or two from Luzac: you need to invest in your authors, you need to look beyond national borders and you need to network. He did all of that and he did it extremely well’, van Vliet thinks. He also teaches you to be accurate when editing and printing works. ‘Sloppy printing won’t get you anywhere, and the same goes for poorly edited texts. You can only become a quality publisher with a list to match when you stick to your chosen policy and demand the best from your editors and designers. Luzac also had a feeling for that aspect of book production: the aesthetically pleasing combination of text and image. He commissioned the famous Amsterdam engraver Jan Punt to cut new plates for the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, for instance, rather than rely on older illustrations, which would have been a lot cheaper.’ Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Dutch market began to change. A great many translations became available, especially from the German, mass literature was on the rise and novels were published in large editions. ‘By that time’, Rietje van Vliet says, ‘the curtain had already fallen for Luzac.’


Luzac’s shop in Leiden was never pillaged, but his Amsterdam colleagues Yntema and Tieboel were not so lucky.

The illustration shows an enraged public turning against these two hapless publishers of anti-Orangist pamphlets

(1768). In the 1780s, however, it was the patriots’ turn to visit Luzac. His shop was commonly known as the place

in town for political works and Orangist printing. Luzac’s political opponents tarred the front of his shop. Luzac

himself was hated, even molested, because of his outspoken views. In spite of, or perhaps rather due to the

controversial nature of these works, the trade in such pamphlets was lucrative business for Luzac.


Author’s rights

There is yet a third development in the early modern book trade that has led to supposedly inalienable rights which have now come under pressure. Elie Luzac was active as a bookseller at a time when authorial rights did not exist. It brought him into serious conflict with the learned establishment of Göttingen University, whose members could not brook the fact that a publisher had so much power. This unfortunate episode in Luzac’s career shows how authors in the eighteenth century began to demand a more promi-nent position for themselves in the world of print. It was not until Napoleon, however, that authorial rights were established by law. In the twenty-first century, author’s rights are again under pressure now that texts in the digital world – with its blogs and social media – are almost impossible to protect.


334 pages | cloth | full colour | with cd-rom

English

isbn 9789072603401

€ 65 | £ 49 | $ 74,50

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Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Bookseller of the Enlightenment