Untitled - Monoskop

GROUNDS FOR SEEKING AND GRANTING PRIVILEGES
printing of his works, and that he was naturally the best person to supervise
the printing. 1 Such ideas may have been in the mind of some authors and of
some officials before 1526, but they are not expressed in any privilege.
Publishers
Publishers who sought privilege naturally tended to put forward economic
arguments in support of their request: that they had incurred or planned to
incur great expense in securing and printing a new item on which they
could not hope to make a fair profit unless other French members of the
book-trade were restrained from reprinting it or selling copies printed
elsewhere, until the first edition had been given
sell.
a reasonable time to
Sometimes however the difficulty and cost of acquiring the manuscript is
particularly stressed. Thus Antoine Bonnemere represented that he had taken
great trouble to secure the copy of a romance ofJudas Maccabeus by Charles
de Saint-Gelais ('qu'il a prins grant peine de recouvrer') (CH 1514, 4).
Regnauld Chaudiere proposed to publish La grant monarchic de France ofClaude
de Seyssel and other works of the same author, 'desquelz livres il a recouvert le
double a grant peine et difficulte' (CH 1519, 6(1)). These were living authors.
The cost here might include paying the author a fee (or giving his secretary a
present), or promising some free copies of the book, in return for buying or
borrowing a manuscript of his work. As far as Seyssel is concerned, the only
existing manuscript of La monarchie de France (the epithet 'grant' seems to have
been an addition made by the publisher) is the fine copy presented to
Francis I by the author in 1515 (BN MS FF 5212). What Chaudiere printed
from was either a rather poor transcript of this or possibly a working copy kept
by the author: it was certainly a less good text than the presentation copy,
quite apart from inaccuracies contributed by the printer. 2
Still, it was
something of a triumph to have tracked down a copy at all. Old, and retired to
his native Savoy, as archbishop of Turin, Seyssel seems to have cared little
3
about having his book printed.
To acquire a hitherto unpublished work by a famous author of the past
might also genuinely involve considerable effort and expense. Colleges and
religious houses might be pleased to lend MSS of scholarly works from their
1
E.g. Ronsard, (Euores completes, STFM, ed. P. Laumonier, vi (1930), 3-6 (privilege Fontaine-
bleau, 4 January 1554 n.s.). Also in grants to less famous authors, e.g. Guillaume Aubert,
L'histoire des guerres (1559), 4 (privilege Bar-le-Duc, 30 September 1559).
2 Claude de Seyssel, La monarchie de France et deux autres fragments politiques, ed. Jacques Poujol
(1961), 'Notice: Histoire du texte', pp. 91-3.
3 Ibid., pp. 17-18.
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