Digital Discovery and Fake Imprints: Unmasking Turn-of-the-Century Pornographers in Paris

• Published in: Book history 2019-01, Vol.22 (1), p.249-279
• Main Author: Colligan, Colette
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Bookstores; Canadian literature; Careers; Digital archives; Digitization; Essays; History; Legal deposit; Library collections; Names; National libraries; Novels; Politics; Pornography & obscenity; Society
• ISSN: 1098-7371; 1529-1499; 1529-1499
• DOI: 10.1353/bh.2019.0008

[...]even if such sources were abundant, physical archives are typically bound by geographical borders, so that the paper trail ends when publishers moved (which they did for job opportunities and to flee the authorities). [...]it seems that the portrait of Gauché's life as a pornographer now needs to be redrawn to include a couple: Underground Portraits: Fake Imprints and Parisian Clandestine Publishers A good place to start are the book imprints pornographers left behind. Since the sixteenth century, imprints have been standard features of European title pages, appearing at the bottom of the page. In these cases, the use of the old imprint functions to reactivate the French pornographic scene of the 1790s, when, as Lynn Hunt argues, pornography as a political weapon erupted into maximum visibility.53 In other similar cases, Brancart lifted signatures from the copy texts of books he reprinted. [...]his 1890 edition of Le Roman de mon alcove, a work originally published in 1872, bore the signature "Chez feu la veuve Girouard bien connue au Palais Royal" ("By the deceased Girouard's widow, who was well known at the Palais Royal"), which was taken from an 1879 reprint of the novel (not the original edition).