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A pseudonym (from the Greek  pseúdos, “false,” and  ónoma, “name”) is an invented name for the author of a literary, musical, or artistic work. Motives for the use of pseudonyms often ranged from political or religious repression to the prospect of negative social consequences, although there were also reasons related to fashion, aesthetics, and poetics. Works published pseudonymously or anonymously were accordingly mostly religious and political, but also included satirical or erotic texts (Satire; Er…

1. To 1800In the first centuries after Gutenberg’s invention of printing with movable metal type (c. 1450), we can assume that only in the cities and towns was there a European color::Lesenreading public that read regularly or even habitually, other than the small circle of scholars and clerics who read for professional or contemplative reasons (Literacy and illiteracy). The reading habits of scholars and the “illiterate” (as people who did not know Latin were called in the Middle Ages and early modern period) differed …

Piracy (in publishing) refers to unauthorized reprinting of already published original printings without permission of the author or the original publishing house. Pirated printings were cheaper because the author did not receive an honorarium; they were often published with a fictitious imprint or without imprint, and sometimes also with textual variants (on recogition: [8. 267–271]). The legal battle against piracy and in favor of copyright was joined in the Old Empire in the 18th and early 19th centuries under the heading of reprints. In the incunabula period and the…

Until well into the 18th century, in the book trade an honorarium (from Latin  honorarium, “gift of honor”) –  in the sense of a sum of money paid in cash to an author for his intellectual work – was paid by publishers only in exceptional cases. In Germany a few authors received a  Bogenhonorar based on the number of pages in a book. More often, however, the honorarium was a “gift,” a testimonial, which until the period of the Enlightenment (18th century) had solely commendatory character. Authors (as well as musicians, painters, etc.) usual…

1. Organizational forms The manufacturing book trade (encompassing both the print shop, see printing, and the publishing house) and the retail book trade (product range) were not yet clearly distinct in the first centuries of the early modern period. Hybrid forms continued to exist even in the 18th century. The first profession to emerge as a phenomenon of the book industry, during the time of the incunabula (from ca. 1480-1500) was the Buchführer, precursor to the bookseller. The Buchführer would sell books, printed ephemera, and brochures, either on behalf of a printe…

Gutenberg’s invention of printing using moveable metal type around 1440/50 spread from Mainz, reaching over 250 European cities by 1500. Printing shops were established especially in commercial and academic centers and episcopal towns: ca. 1460 in Strasbourg and Bamberg, 1465 in Subiaco (Rome), 1466 in Cologne, 1468 in Augsburg and Basel, 1469 in Venice, 1470 in Naples, Nuremberg, and Paris, 1471 in Florence and Milan, 1473 in Lyon, Ulm, and Utrecht, 1474 in Valencia and Krakow, 1475 …

1. The fairs of Frankfurt and Leipzig The sale of manuscripts at the general goods fair of the conveniently-located town of Frankfurt is already attested for the 14th century. Printed books are known to have been sold there by the pioneer publisher Peter Schöffer of Mainz from the 1460s. Although the trade was mainly itinerant (Book trade), the Frankfurt Messe was already attracting paper merchants and printer-publishers from northern and southern Germany (e.g. Basel, Lübeck, Nuremberg) in the last third of the 15th century. Book sales rapidly became a …

From the 16th century until well into the 20th, the  Index librorum prohibitorum was an authoritative list of books and pamphlets to guide Catholic Church censorship. As an instrument of censorship after the fact (of publication), it listed printed material which Catholics were forbidden to trade, purchase, own, or read, usually on pain of excommunication. The Reformation employed the still relatively new technology of printing to propagate its ideas, using books and printed ephemera, primarily in the verna…

1. Definition and distribution The term incunabula (Latin, “swaddling clothes,” “cradle”) or cradle books denotes all the printed materials produced in Europe from the invention of printing with movable type by Gutenberg c. 1440-1450 through December 31, 1500. This date was already defined arbitrarily as the end of the incunabula period in the 17th century by the dean of the Münster cathedral, Bernhard von Mallinckrodt, in his  De ortu ac progressu artis typographicae dissertatio historica (1640; “Historical Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Art of Pr…

1. Terminology and functionPrinted ephemera are short occasional publications in various small formats. The German term Flugschrift (alongside Flugblatt) was coined by C.F.D. Schubart in 1787/1788, based on French   feuille volante (flying [i.e. loose] leaf; hence also Italian foglio volante). In today’s technical literature, only an item consisting of just a single leaf or two (folded if necessary) is called a Flugblatt; English sometimes distinguishes between a broadside (a single leaf) and a broadsheet (more or less like a Flugblatt). Such ephemera were always intended …

1. Definition Patronage in scholarship, science, and the arts is the financial support and encouragement offered by individual patrons or institutions to practitioners. The quintessential patron in Greco-Roman antiquity was Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, the friend and advisor to the Emperor Augustus in the 1st century BCE who operated as patron of a circle of poets that included Horace. Maecenas’ name has entered many European languages (but not English) as a common noun with the sense of “patron” or “sponsor” (German  Mäzen; French  mécène; Czech  mecenáš), and in derivatives wit…

1. General considerations Censorship (Lat. censura; “examination,” “judgment”) is now understood as the “authoritative monitoring of human utterances” [18. 3] and serves for communication monitoring, generally for the stabilization of a state or church system. This monitoring is realized by means of various different practical measures: by preventive censorship, which requires the submission for examination of manuscripts by relevant institutions before printing begins, or subsequent or repressive censorship, whi…