Having accepted the invitation to revisit my essay of 1982, “What Is the History of Books?”, I find that I can do it only in the first person singular and therefore must ask to be excused for indulging in some autobiographical detail. I would also like to make a disclaimer: in proposing a model for studying the history of books twenty-four years ago, I did not mean to tell book historians how they ought to do their jobs. I hoped that the model might be useful in a heuristic way and never thought of it as comparable to the models favored by economists, the kind in which you insert data, work it over, and arrive at a bottom line. (I do not believe that bottom lines exist in history.) It seemed to me in 1982 that the history of books was suffering from fissiparousness: experts were pursuing such specialized studies that they were losing contact with one another. The esoteric elements of book history needed to be integrated into an overview that would show how the parts could connect to form a whole—or what I characterized as a communications circuit. The tendency toward fragmentation and specialization still exists.

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CONTENTS 1. Mesmerism and Popular Science 2. The Mesmerist Movement 46 3. The Radical Strain in Mesmerism 82 4. Mesmerism as a Radical Political Theory 5. From Mesmer to Hugo 6. Conclusion Bibliographical Note Appendix l. Mesmer's Propositions 177 Appendix 2. The Milieu of Amateur Scientists in Paris Appendix 3. The Societe de l'Harmonie Universelle Appendix 4. Bergasse's Lectures on Mesmerism Appendix 5. The Emblem and Textbook of the Societes de !'Harmonie Appendix 6. An Antimesmerist View 189 Appendix 7. French Passages Translated in the Text 193 Index 213 xi ILLUSTRATIONS A cartoon satirizing a mesmerist session A favorable view of a mesmerist session Another view of a mesmerist seance A typical cosmology A balloon flight The "elastic shoes" experiment A monster believed to have been captured in South America A typical plan for flying machines A satirical picture of the amateur scientist The death of Pilatre de Rozier Mesmer A mesmerist charlatan An antimesmerist cartoon The report of the royal commission

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