Revolution and Enlightenment in France
Simon Schama
- The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’ 1775-1800 by Robert Darnton
Harvard, 624 pp, £13.00, September 1979, ISBN 0 674 08786 0
No walnuts, no Enlightenment, it seems. For, as Robert Darnton tells us in his epic chronicle of the Life and Times of the quarto edition of the Encyclopédie, it was nuts and resin from the Midi together with Paris turpentine and linseed oil which made the ink (six monstrous 250-livre barrels) which primed the type which printed the 36 million sheets which comprised the quarto which lowered the price which Spread the Word which overthrew superstition which disarmed the Old Regime and inaugurated the rationalist millennium. Or was it?
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Vol. 1 No. 5 · 20 December 1979 » Simon Schama » Revolution and Enlightenment in France (print version)
pages 1-4 | 3467 words