Untitled - Monoskop

REPRINTS AFTER EXPIRY OF A PRIVILEGE
edition, dated 3 July 1528, printing his privilege of 4 September 1527 on the
verso of the title-page and the terms of the Parlement arret of 6 June 1528,
upholding his claim to it, on the facing page. The arret refers to Pontac's
edition only as 'les coustumes de Bourdeaulx par luy faictes imprimer a Paris'
and makes no mention of the royal privilege which Pontac had obtained for it.
Pontac would have been free to sell his edition as soon as Guyart's privilege
had expired. Why, knowing better than anyone what his Parlement had
granted Guyart, did Pontac go to the lengths of obtaining a royal privilege and
having an edition printed at his own expense? Guyart was evidently very
dilatory in taking up his privilege and 1
printing the Coutumes. Pontac may
have begun to think that he was not going to do so at all. Meanwhile the many
people who needed a copy of the revised Coutumes may well have been
complaining, and the greffier would be at the receiving end of the complaints.
Whatever the reason for his initiative, the reason for the grant of a royal
privilege to him is clear enough. There were plenty of precedents for the
grejfiers receiving a privilege in respect of Coutumes and Pontac's application to
the royal chancery would have seemed perfectly normal in the absence of any
statement from him that a privilege had already been granted to someone else
by the Parlement of Bordeaux.
REPRINTS AFTER EXPIRY OF A PRIVILEGE
A certain number of cases have been noticed, in the course of preparing the
present work, of reprints being brought out by other publishers soon after the
lapse of a privilege, sometimes so soon after that it can hardly be coincidence,
that is, that a colleague was only waiting for the privilege to run out before
copying the book. Here are some examples.
The first edition of the Coutumes of Maine came out in Paris with a privilege
dated 7 September 1509 (PA 1509, 4), granted to Martin Le Saige, thegrejfier.
It was to run for two years, so it expired on 6 1 1 1 . September 5 By 7 May 1513,
a reprint had been completed by Martin Morin at Rouen (BN Res. F. 2345).
This reprint reproduces word for word the conclusion of the original edition,
which recorded the transcribing of the Coutume by Martin Le Saige, and the
and to take
permission given to him by the Parlement to have it printed
whatever profit there might be in so doing: only the formula at the end, which
forbade other printers to copy it for two years, was omitted, Le Saige's
exclusive right in the copy having by then expired.
1
J. Delpit, Origines de I'imprimerie en Guyenne (Bordeaux, 1869), pp. 39-43, first drew attention to
this case, followed by A. Claudin, Les et les
origines
debuts de I'imprimerie a Bordeaux (1897),
pp. 45-6. Delpit seems to imply that he had seen the originals of the entries printed by Guyart
in the registers of the Parlement of Bordeaux. At the present day the series of the registers,
preserved in the Archives de la Gironde, is incomplete, and there is a gap between Vol. xix
(which ends at 16 September 1524) and Vol. xx (which begins May 1528), and a gap in Vol. xx
from 30 May to 4 September 1528.