Mémoires de l’Académie des colporteurs.

Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe.

Mémoires de l’Académie des colporteurs.

Paris

De l’imprimerie ordinaire de l’Académie

1748

Colporteurs, or peddlers, played an important role in the distribution of books and pamphlets in rural areas of Europe from the advent of printing through the nineteenth century. Because they often dealt in salacious or seditious literature, these itinerant booksellers were objects of interest. This description of colporteurs and their wares, presented as a parody of the French Academy’s annual reports, was the anonymous work of antiquarian and archeologist Anne Claude Philippe Caylus (1692–1765). The frontispiece shows an enterprising colporteur at work on a village street.

Purchased in 1996.