But German scholars are beginning to tap sources like Das gelehrte Teutschland, which lists four thousand writers in 1779, and to trace the links

21 Marino Berengo has shown how much can be discovered about author publisher relations in Italy.22 And the work of A. S. Collins still provides an excellent account of authorship in England, although it needs to be brought up to date and extended beyond the eighteenth century.23 2. Publishers. The key role of publishers is now becoming clearer, thanks to articles appearing in the Journal of Publishing History and monographs like Martin Lowry's The World of Aldus Manutius, Robert Patten's Charles Dickens and His Publishers, and Gary Stark's Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative This content downloaded from (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0)46.196.74.144 on Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:41:34 +00:00(cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0) (cid:0)

All use subject to 75 76 ROBERT DARNTON

Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933. But the evolution of the publisher as a distinct figure in contrast to the master bookseller and the printer still needs systematic study. Historians have barely begun to tap the papers of publishers, although they are the richest of all sources for the history of books. The archives of the Cotta Verlag in Marbach, for example, contain at least one hundred fifty thousand documents, yet they have only been skimmed for references to Goethe, Schiller, and other famous writers. Further investigation almost certainly would turn up a great deal of information about the book as a force in nineteenth century Germany. How did publishers draw up contracts with authors, build alliances with booksellers, negotiate with political authorities, and handle finances, supplies, shipments, and publicity? The answers to those questions would carry the history of books deep into the territory of social, economic, and political history, to their mutual benefit.