© laura carnelos, ���6 | doi �0.��63/9789004�77 �99_033 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0) License. chapter 32 Words on the Street: Selling Small Printed ‘Things’ in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Venice Laura Carnelos In early modern Europe books were not only sold inside bookshops. Especially ordinary or everyday editions—those books printed and reprinted without any major changes to text or to typography, and the smallest works, such as histories, miracles, prayer books, news reports and songs—were often brought out on the street and sold around the city at the most populous places, such as squares, bridges and in front of churches.1 At the root of this strategy, and underpinning the relationship between these editions and the ways they were sold, there were—of course—commercial reasons: “more people, more money” was an obvious connection. In this chapter I would like to propose a case study of the trade agents and distribution conditions of news and other small printed material within the sixteenth and seventeenth century Venetian Republic. Admittedly, the pecu- liar urban structure of Venice and the high concentration of printers and book- sellers make it an exceptional case, even though it is possible to identify some shared characteristics with other European cities. However, Venice provides a useful example because of the important role it played within the European book market in the early modern age and because of the valuable and copious 1 Concerning London, see Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street. An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); concerning Madrid, Jean-François Botrel, Libros, prensa y lectura en la España del siglo x ix (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1993), pp. 125–31; Ana Martínez Rus, ‘El libro en la calle. De la venta ambu- lante a las ferias del libro’, in Senderos de ilusión. Lecturas populares en Europa y América Latina (del siglo xv i a nuestros días), ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez and Verónica Sierra Blas (Somonte-Cenero [Gijón]: Trea, 2007), pp. 171–88; for Paris, Robert Darnton, ‘An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, The American Historical Review, 105.1 (February 2000), pp. 1–27; Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France. Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 44. On itinerant distribution networks see Jeroen L. Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press. Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands 1600–1850 (Leiden: Brill 2013) and Not Dead Things. The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1820, ed. Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond and Jeroen L. Salman (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Laura Carnelos - 9789004277199 Downloaded from Brill.com05/31/2020 03:22:46AM via free access