This work offers for the first time a complete list of all books published wholly or partially in the French language before 1601. Based on twelve years of investigations in libraries in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere, it provides an analytical short-title catalogue of over 52,000 bibliographically distinct items, with reference to surviving copies in over 1,600 libraries worldwide. Many of the items described are editions and even complete texts fully unknown and re-discovered by the project. French Vernacular Books is an invaluable research tool for all students and scholars interested in the history, culture and literature of France, as well as historians of the early modern book world. For vols. III & IV please go to French Books III & IV.

The artists? book 'How To Shoplift Books' by David Horvitz is a guide on how to steal books. It details 80 ways in which one can steal a book, from the very practical, to the witty, imaginative, and romantic ways. Originally published in 2013, this paperback re-issue is making this sought after title available again and is published in an English, Spanish and French version. 17 more languages will be released successively.

How two French families made—and lost—their fortunes in the brutal plantation culture of pre-revolutionary Haiti. In 1729, Marc-Antoine Lamerenx, a minor French nobleman, set sail for Saint-Domingue. Twenty years later, peasant Jean Mouscardy also made the long and difficult journey to Saint-Domingue. Although the men were not related and had little in common, they hailed from the same Pyrenean town, La Bastide Clairence. In the New World, they both settled in Saint-Martin-du-Dondon, where they made their fortunes growing coffee. After the Haitian slave revolt uprooted them, some of their descendants stayed in Haiti and took part in building the new nation. Others took refuge in France, started businesses in New Orleans, or transferred their slaves and their Haitian experience to new coffee plantations in Cuba. Wealth and Disaster follows the emigrant Lamerenx and Mouscardy families over three generations and various locations across the Caribbean. Pierre Force traces their white and mixed-race descendants from the early-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and over decades of comings and goings between their French ancestral town and Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and New Orleans. A chance encounter in a French archive led Force to uncover an epic saga, a fascinating and character-driven story of pirates, revolution, staggering riches, financial ruination, natural disaster, harsh imprisonment, and the rise and fall of the plantation economy. By observing the circulation of a few individuals between the Pyrenees and the Caribbean, Force is able to show how these two worlds became interconnected. Arguing that who emigrated and how depended on one’s position in the Pyrenean house-based system, Force also reveals how capital accumulation in Saint-Domingue relied on Pyrenean networks and how, in turn, wealth acquired in America changed the rules of the game back home. An exciting and accessible history, Wealth and Disaster offers riveting insight into the matrimonial strategies and inheritance customs of French rural society and the resulting choices to emigrate or to stay.

This book examines the Duke of Anjou's ambivalent relationship with the politique struggle.