The Encyclopaedic Paradox: Printing Privileges and the Practice of Compiling Books (Holy Roman Empire and France, 1730s–50s)

This paper examines the gap between book market regulations and piratical practices through a comparative study of two eighteenth‐century encyclopaedias. It investigates contemporary discourses on excerpting by analysing the interplay between their printing privileges and prefaces. Specifically, it asks whether the authorities that granted printing privileges treated the reproduction of excerpts as an exception to the general prohibition on reprinting and whether they accorded printed excerpts a distinct legal or conceptual status. This comparative approach is applied to two case studies: Zedler's Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon (1732–54) and the Paris Encyclopédie (1751–72), edited by Diderot, d'Alembert, and Jaucourt. I first argue that the printing privileges granted to these works prohibited the compilation of textual material from them, even though the works themselves consisted largely of collections of excerpts. This encyclopaedic paradox highlights the considerable commercial value that printed excerpts had acquired, as monopolistic booksellers used printing privileges to assert exclusive control over them. Second, I argue that, in response to accusations of ‘piracy’ and ‘plagiarism’, continental editors of encyclopaedias defended their editorial practices by adapting the preface to Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopædia (1727) to their own publishing contexts. In doing so, they articulated principles of scholarship and authorship that stood in tension with the legal claims embodied in their works' printing privileges. Finally, I argue that the interplay between printing privileges and prefaces had two major consequences: first, these works had to be printed abroad; second, unlike in Britain, no distinct legal or conceptual status emerged for either the practice of excerpting or the printed excerpt itself.