Pour une histoire liégeoise des best-sellers. La fabrique du livre d'éducation au XVIIIe siècle

Unlike in printing centers like Geneva, Neuchâtel or Amsterdam, Liège did not maintain direct and constant relationships with great authors of the Enlightenment. Its printing businesse was mainly dedicated to the reproduction of bestsellers. It did not keep archives of its commerce. As a paradoxical result, Léonard Defrance's paintings illustrating the Liège publishing factories are well-known and often reproduced; but the contecnt of the bundles of books represented by Defrance remains in some shadow except for the counterfeits of the major philosophical wroks. Thus our research about this printing centre was concentrated on typographical elements that allow us to identify what was really printed and distributed by Clément Plomteux or Jean François Bassompierre. The latter devoted an important part of his business to copying best-sellers of the "second rank" whose unappreciated editorial and chcronological varietes are now more discernible and accessible dut to the Internet. In this article we record many unknown editions of educational books published in Liège, and we look through the window they open on the culture of the second half of the eighteenth century. THis study intends to inscribe the Liège booktrade in the history of bessellers that is dominated by centers like the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel (studies by the project "The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe and the STN database").