Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [29]
To recognize how reprinting worked and what it meant is to get a different impression of the Enlightenment itself. The piratical Enlightenment was lower-toned, more commercial, more hardscrabble, more various, and altogether edgier than the world of the high Parisian phi/os- ophes or Scottish philosophers with which we are familiar. Yet that world was never clearly distinct from it. David Hume was caught up in London booksellers' attempts to destroy Scottish "pirates"; Rousseau and Voltaire assailed pirate reprinters of their works and availed themselves of those same reprinters when it suited them to do so; Goethe and Lessing did likewise. Isaac Newton's workwas printed by a press pirate, and was itself reprinted without his consent. Stephen Storace's music drifted between opera houses, freely appropriated by rival impresarios. Lawrence Sterne took up a pen and personally signed over twelve thousand copies of Tristrain Shandy to preempt a pirated edition.i"To the extent that these men achieved transcendence as authors, it was precisely because they engaged with the pirate realm at a mundane level and mastered its complexities. Those who did not succeed have either been forgotten altogether, dismissed as mediocrities, or consigned to discrete spheres where heroic authorship is deemed inappropriate, such as hackery, pornography, or the newspaper press.
The term enlightenment carries connotations of a certain kind of information dispersal. The association is with illumination itselfof light spreading equally in all directions from a central source. But in the eighteenth century the transfer from place to place of texts, ideas, practices, and the like was scarcely amenable to such an image. The kind ofubiquity that happened to certain works and ideas was not one with which we are nowadays very familiar. We are used to living in a world where publishing operates according to more or less common standards; internationalized copyright laws are, among other things, the projection of those standards into the legal sphere. In the eighteenth century, things were very different. Printing was a local craft, addressing local and regional markets. Its legal, conventional, and moral institutions were local too. Printed ideas attained ubiquity not only by distribution from major centers, but also by tension and competition between them and a more numerous set of reprinters, who acted as relays between author and reader. The more the competition, the greater the ubiquity. Locke's works, for example, emerged first from London, but were reprinted in Dublin, Glasgow, Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, Geneva, Brussels, Paris, Leipzig, Uppsala,Jena, Mannheim, Milan, Naples, Stockholm (by order of the Swedish Riksdag, no less), and, ultimately, Boston. Rousseau's Nouvelle HeloI e, appearing first in Paris, was soon reproduced in `Amsterdam" (actually London), Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel, Basle, Leipzig, and Brussels. Montesquieu's work, again first published in Paris, reappeared in all the same countries. Voltaire's appeared initially, sometimes, in Geneva, only to be reprinted in Paris and London. Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, probably the most sensational single publishing phenomenon of the century, achieved that status by virtue of appearing in some thirty different editions, many of them in translation, and almost all unauthorized. When Italian readers encountered Locke, they were less likely to be viewing Locke's own words than those words as translated into Italian from a French