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Dalmatian Publishers of the First Half of the 19th Century: Meeting the Demands of the Book Marketplace?

As Robert Darnton has once warned, books of the late 17th and early 18th centuries often did not respect linguistic or national limits, frequently written by authors who belonged to the international Republic of Letters, composed by printers who often did not work in their mother tongue, sold by booksellers who worked across national boundaries, and read in one language by readers who spoke another. The statement can be largely applied to the Kingdom of Dalmatia, the most southeastern land of the early 19th century Austrian Empire. Its complex historical destiny (long-lasting rule of the Republic of Venice), ethno-confessional diversity (Croats, Italians, Orthodox, Jews) and language variety (German and Italian as the official languages and the languages of the educated, both Italians and Croats ; the vernacular (Croatian) as the language of the common people ; still not outdated Latin) were reflected in the publishing business, too. Based on the research on books published in the first half of the 19th century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way Dalmatian publishers of the age shaped and adjusted their publishing policy to customers’ reading taste, needs and knowledge. The research is going to be made according to languages, authors, subject, and genre. Foreign authors, predominantly Italian (most often published in Italian), and occasionally German or French (usually published either in Italian or in Croatian translation, or sometimes bilingually), are going to be identified and discussed since some of them were at the time already many times republished across all of Europe. Equal attention will be given to works in the vernacular, some of which gaining their translations (as a rule to Italian), too. Special attention will be given to translations (mostly from Italian to Croatian, Croatian to Italian and German to Italian) and their subject and genre analysis. The paper will try to identify if some significant publishing patterns can be detected and to what extent Dalmatian publishers did meet the demands of the book marketplace, having in mind that the educated who had usually multilingual skills were not in their choice of books confined to the local publishers, often reading books coming from abroad, too.

book marketplace, 19th century, Dalmatia

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