Books on Their Backs: Colportage and the Pedlars of Grimoires

The French word colporteur refers to someone who carries goods «at the neck», in a box or basket held up by straps. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century these pedlars travelled on foot along the roads and mule tracks of Europe, carrying needles, ribbons, holy pictures and above all cheap books. Without them almanacs, popular romances and booklets of secrets would never have reached the most isolated villages, and the history of reading would have been very different.

Who the colporteurs were

Many pedlars came from poor mountain regions where seasonal emigration was a necessity: the Pyrenees, the Dauphiné, Savoy, some valleys of Normandy. They set out in autumn, after the farm work, and returned in spring. They stocked up from printers and wholesalers, such as those of Troyes or Rouen, and knew their customers' tastes well: they knew which titles sold at fairs, which in the parishes and which were best kept at the bottom of the box.

At that bottom there sometimes ended up forbidden books, including cheap editions of grimoires such as the Dragon rouge or the Poule noire. The authorities were well aware of this, and repeatedly ordered checks on pedlars' wares. But the very mobility of these sellers made any surveillance difficult, and the magical book went on circulating together with devotional images and calendars, often sold in a low voice and at a higher price than the other titles.

The Tesino pedlars and the prints of Bassano

Italy too had its pedlars of books and images. The most famous came from the Tesino, a valley in Trentino, and sold across half of Europe the prints of the Remondini firm of Bassano, one of the largest popular publishing businesses of the eighteenth century. Their boxes held holy cards, playing cards, views, instructive sheets and images of curious subjects, sometimes connected with astrology or popular beliefs.

Another product sold by pedlars was the lunario, the yearly almanac with weather forecasts, fairs and advice. The best known is the Barbanera of Foligno, published since the second half of the eighteenth century. These sheets and booklets had a fixed place in many homes, hung near the hearth, and preserved a simplified astrological knowledge handed down from one generation to the next.

The commission of 1852

In France the turning point came with the Second Empire. A law of 1849 had already required authorisation for itinerant selling, and in 1852 a commission was set up to examine all the books of colportage, which had to receive a stamp before they could be sold. Its secretary, Charles Nisard, gathered the material into a Histoire des livres populaires published in 1854, which is still a fundamental source.

Paradoxically, the work born to censor these books has become one of the best tools for knowing them. Thanks to Nisard's descriptions and illustrations, we know what French peasants read in the nineteenth century, including the grimoires that the commission wanted to eliminate. Colportage died out slowly, replaced by the railway, newspapers and provincial bookshops, but it left a deep mark on European popular culture.