Rare Book School Lecture: Publishing in the Renaissance: Christophe Plantin’s Business Strategy

Printing technology accelerated the forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation. But it also created a major new business problem: publishing risk. A publisher had to spend large sums of money to print a book before knowing how well it would sell. The publisher's decision whether to accept this risk was a gateway through which all printed books had to pass. Mark McConnell has been investigating Christophe Plantin's business records from the 1560s, still intact after 460 years. These records document in remarkable detail the activities of Europe's largest printer at the time and make it possible to quantify the cost of individual books and the risk taken in publishing them. Applying modern business concepts to the data, McConnell will offer insights on key issues in publishing strategy: what types of books were printed, why books were produced in the forms we now see, how production costs shaped competition in the marketplace, and the steps that publishers took to control and reduce risk.