Elizabeth Armstrong: Before Copyright. The French Book-Privilege System 1498-1526 (1990)

“When printing first began, a new book automatically fell into the public domain upon publication. Only a special law or privilegium enacted by a competent authority could protect it from being reprinted without the consent of the author or publisher. Such privileges for books are attested before 1480, but in Germany and Italy their efficacy was limited to a relatively small area by the political fragmentation of the country. During the 1480s and 1490s France became one of Europe’s main centres of book production and, as competition intensified, privileges were sought there from 1498. Although privileges were to last as long as the Ancien Régime, the period to 1526 is the least-known stage of their development and the most important. Most privilege-holders printed the full text of their grant, and many others a summary.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1990
ISBN 0521374081
344 pages

Publisher

PDF

Paul Otlet: Traité de documentation. Le livre sur le livre. Théorie et pratique (1934) [French]

“In the 1920s and 1930s, Paul Otlet wrote about radio and television as other forms of conveying information, writing in his 1934 masterpiece Traité de documentation that ‘one after another, marvellous inventions have immensely extended the possibilities of documentation.’ He also predicted that media that would convey feel, taste and smell would also eventually be invented, and that an ideal information-conveyance system should be able to handle all of what he called ‘sense-perception documents’. The book has not been translated into English yet.” (Wikipedia)

Publisher Editiones Mundaneum, Brussels, 1934
431 pages

PDF (196M; scanned by the Ghent University)
Internet Archive (multiple formats)
Wikisource

Quentin Meillassoux: The Number and The Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de dés (2011/2012) [French, English]

“A meticulous literary study, a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe, a treasure-hunt worthy of an adventure novel – such is the register in which can be deciphered the hidden secrets of a poem like no other. Quentin Meillassoux, author of After Finitude, continues his philosophical interrogation of the concepts of chance, contingency, infinity and eternity through a concentrated study of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de dés, patiently deciphering its enigmatic meaning on the basis of a dazzlingly simple and lucid insight with regard to that ‘unique Number that cannot be another’.

Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard constitutes perhaps the most radical break in the history of modern poetry: the fractured lines spanning the double page, the typographical play borrowed from the poster form, the multiplication of interpolations disrupting reading. But the intrigue of this poem is still stranger, always resistant to full elucidation. We encounter a shipwreck, and a Master, himself almost submerged, who clasps in his hand the dice that, confronted by the furious waves, he hesitates to throw. The hero expects this throw, if it takes place, to be extraordinarily important: a Number said to be ‘unique’ and which ‘can be no other’.

The decisive point of the investigation proposed by Meillassoux comes with a discovery, unsettling and yet as simple as a child’s game. All the dimensions of the Number, understood progressively, articulate between them but one sole condition: that this Number should ultimately be delivered to us by a secret code, hidden in the Coup de dés like a key that finally unlocks every one of its poetic devices. Thus is also unveiled the meaning of that siren, emerging for a lightning-flash amongst the debris of the shipwreck: as the living heart of a drama that is still unfolding.

The English volume contains the entire text of the Coup de dés and three other poems, with new translations.”

Le nombre et la sirène. Un déchiffrage du Coup de dés de Mallarmé
Publisher Fayard, 2011
ISBN 2213666989, 9782213666983
256 pages

English edition
Translated by Robin Mackay
Publisher Urbanomic, Falmouth, and Sequence Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 9780983216926
306 pages

Review (Michael Reid, Mute)
Review (Adam Kotsko, The New Inquiry)
Review (Thomas H. Ford, Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy)
Review (Edward K. Kaplan, Nineteenth-Century French Studies)
Review (Brian Kim Stefans, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Graham Harman’s blog post about the book, part 2

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

PDF, PDF (French, updated on 2015-1-24)
PDF, PDF (English, updated on 2015-1-24)