great news, one of the books I was looking for arrived today and it has a whole section on pre french revolution book piracy and the thriving trade in hiding and trafficking banned literature.
people used to mule illegal books through the mountains, and many contraband smugglers refused to carry them because, unlike drugs or guns, if you were caught with proscribed literature you could be executed or (worse) sentenced to hard labour until you died
okay! the hazardous and expensive contraband mule strategy was only for the really hot titles that were considered to promote outright treason or blasphemy. most banned literature at the time was actually sold under the counter by mainstream publishing houses, and was incredibly popular and profitable.
publishers around europe would trade inventories of the books they produced to maintain varied inventories they could sell to clients. e.g. publisher A prints thousands of copies of a hundred french titles, publisher B prints thousands of copies of a hundred german titles, they do swapsies, now they both have a range of 200 titles to trade. this applied to banned books too, and the banned books had higher market values due to the additional complications involved in production and shipping — one proscribed book might be worth 2-4 legal books, depending on the heat and the relationship between the publishers.
this trade was kind of an open secret, mostly conducted using code words and tricks like stuffing a crate with safe books on top and illegal works on the bottom or hidden in the packing materials. clients who ordered banned books from their local booksellers would often include that part of the order as a separate, unsigned slip of paper that could be disposed of after reading. sometimes they would make special requests for discreet packaging — one surviving letter asks for a fake receipt to be made out for legal books, so that the customer could get them past the finance department at work. another fun trick was 'larding', where loose leaf pages of the illegal books would be tucked between pages of respectable volumes. one client asked their bookseller to send a quantity of banned pornography larded inside religious texts.
being such a profitable trade, of course there were corrupt inspectors involved too. certain publishers and booksellers had networks of friendly agents who would let their shipments pass through inspection for a cut of the take. this would sometimes mean sending books by weird circuitous routes around europe to make sure they passed through friendly hands and got their stamp of approval before finally making their way back to the client.
I'm still reading on a lot of this and waiting for some other second hand texts to get to me, but every new thing I learn is improving my life and brain x1000
btw the moral you should take from all this is that the modern publishers and institutions who are currently shaking and shivering and peeing as they cut books on race relations and lgbtq+ topics from their catalogues are uniquely craven and pathetic and would be looked upon with scorn and derision by their forebears throughout human history.
