The chapters in this volume grew out of the first conference devoted solely to the trade of paper. The speakers and attendees met in Erlangen, Germany, in February 2019, having travelled from Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, the Netherlands, North America, Spain, and the UK. Working across the fields of book history, literature, the history of science, the history of communication, the digital humanities, and library science, the speakers shared their geographically and chronologically wide-ranging research into the evidence supplied by watermarks, archival records, bookbindings, and large-scale databases.1 The conference was generously sponsored by the German Research Association (DFG) and by the ‘Freundeskreis der Erlanger Buchwissenschaft’ at the Institute for the Study of the Book (Friedrich- Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), and the conference posters were printed on beautiful sheets of handmade paper bearing watermarks, produced by Matthias Schwethelm in his “Papieroffizin” in Fürth.2
The impetus to undertake a project shedding light on the early modern paper trade originated several years prior to the conference, within the collaborative discussions of the international research network ‘The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe’ (founded by Daniel Bellingradt and Sandra Zawrel in 2015).3 The edited volume took shape in the months before and after the conference when Anna Reynolds began co-editing the collection with Daniel Bellingradt. The editors would like to thank the speakers and attendees that made the Erlangen conference an invigorating and productive event, as well as the members of the ‘Paper Trade’ network who are so often a source of excellent knowledge and advice on all things paper-related. We are grateful to the contributors for their hard work, enthusiasm, and patience as the collection came to fruition. Finally, we offer our gratitude to Andrew Pettegree and the team at Brill for the encouragement and assistance that made the volume possible.
Daniel Bellingradt and Anna Reynolds
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and University of St Andrews
See Heather Wolfe’s conference report: ‘The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks, 26.02-2019–27.02.2019 Erlangen’, H-Soz-Kult 29.0.4.2019,
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