The International “Commerce of Genius”: Foreign Books in Romantic-Period London

This essay addresses the question of the presence and availability of foreign books in London between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After considering the difficulties related to obtaining foreign volumes from pri­vate libraries, such as that of Holland House, it turns to examine the role played by periodicals in reviewing foreign titles and advertising the lists and catalogues of those booksellers who stocked and sold foreign works. Focusing on some of the most successful among them (such as Boosey, Treuttel and Wurtz, Deboffe and Dulau), the essay sketches out a map of their businesses in London, the languages they covered, their different groups of customers, as well as the commercial and political risks to which they were exposed. As this preliminary investigation makes clear, this multifaceted phenomenon has not yet been the object of detailed explorations and reconstructions. Accordingly, this essay traces the outline of, and ad­vocates, a comprehensive study of the history of the trade in foreign pub­lications in London and Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. By filling a major gap in our knowledge of the history of the book, this recon­struction may also offer invaluable new insights into the international co­ordinates of the literary field in the Romantic era, and particularly in the years after Waterloo, when the cross-currents of an international "com­merce of genius" (as the Literary Gazette called it in 1817) became an in­trinsic feature of an increasingly cosmopolitan cultural milieu