). As an anecdote, it is quite telling that David Hume (1711-1776) would have preferred his History of England to be printed in quarto sized fine-paper six-volume set in late 1760s (as it had appeared earlier), but the editions that were actually published after 1767 until Hume's death (including the 1778 posthumous edition) are octavo editions in eight volumes. Octavo editions might have lacked the exclusivity and finesse of heavier tomes with large margins, but it was particularly the smaller formats, octavo and duodecimo, that changed the nature and relevance of printing in the later part of the eighteenth century.
The most complete data set included in this study is the ESTC. At the same time it is evident that ESTC is not complete in the sense that it would include all the recorded documents in different libraries. Going through some of the records of larger repositories, such as the National Library of Scotland, quickly reveals you that their collections includes at least dozens of documents not yet recorded in the cumulative ESTC. This, however, is not a problem for our analysis because we are mainly focused on general trends that do not require all the possible records in order to be reliable (QUOTE). One particularly interesting feature of ESTC is the high proportion of duodecimo documents. At the end of eighteenth century, duodecimo in ESTC reaches the same level as the fast-dropping folio. Compared to fractions of gatherings in HPBD for example this is a highly noticable feature. In SNB, folio is at the same level as duodecimo, but the share of the total volume is much lower compared to ESTC. This is probably due to the question of costs of printing. As the demand for cheaper reads grew, the market responded (READING NATION QUOTE). If we analyse different cities based on fractions of book formats, we realise that it was especially places in North America, Dublin, Edinburgh and specifically Glasgow where duodecimo format has the highest share of the printing area. Interestingly, in London, folio format seems to keep it's relatively high share of the market even in the later part of the eighteenth century. Also in the traditional University towns of Oxford and Cambridge duodecimo does not rise to the top-2 formats in the later eighteenth century, which is noteworthy in the Anglo-American context.
The most incomplete data set that we used in this article is the HPBD. Nature of HPBD is such that it is not an integrated catalogue, but more of a collection of different national catalogues with varying amounts of data. Thus, all the analysis of HPBD need to be executed with certain caution, although we have validated some of the results by making cross-catalogue checks against data from the other catalogues. Thus, we can say that we can rely on the general trends that are apparent in HPBD, but more particular the analysis becomes, the more careful we need to be. One general feature of HPBD when it comes to the question of format, along with the earlier noted sharp rise of the octavo, is the relatively large share of folio books. It is worth noting that with respect to HPBD folio format keeps a fairly large share of the total print area of published documents until mid-eighteenth century. We may notice a similar trend also in ESTC, whereas in SNB folio seems to have been on a sharper drop for a longer period of time. Of particular places in HPBD, the large share of folio in Madrid and Brussels catches one's eye.
The dominant document format in the seventeenth century together with folio was quarto throughout Europe. There is an unusual peak during the civil war era in ESTC caused by the Thomason Tracts (QUOTE). This means that because of the cataloguing rules of including different variants in the catalogue, Thomason was able to gather so many of these with respect to civil war pamphlets that there is a noticeable statistical peak because of them. This needs to be noted, but it does not change the overall general trend (ALI JA EDITION LEVEL ON GOING WORK NOTED HERE THAT SOLVES MANY OF SUCH DUPLICATE ISSUES TO CERTAIN EXTENT AT LEAST). Quarto document was, as said earlier, the common document format for pamphlets and other shorter pieces. If we look at the HPBD we see that quarto's share is fairly constant throughout the early modern period. In ESTC, however, there is a declining curve since the second half of the seventeenth century. This is because of the even quicker increase of other formats, in ESTC quarto format does not decline in absolute numbers, but like all other book formats, it's absolute numbers are rising in the eighteenth century.
It is also interesting to notice that there seems to be a correlation between the language of the document and the format in question. Comparing (USA GATHERINGS, ESTC) books published in English, Latin and other languages in London suggests that especially duodecimo was the preferred format for books printed in other languages than English and Latin, whereas octavo was the one used proportionally more in Latin books than others. Especially the small share of folio documents in Latin is interesting. Also the quarto share of Latin in this respect in London is noteworthy.
Latin printing and different formats
Discussion
Our systematic approach provides a starting point and guidelines for more extensive integration of national catalogues.
ESTC? CERL? Open ecosystems? Research support? Open data? Open science? Open methods?
National bibliographies are essentially about mapping the national canon of publishing, but integrating data across borders should be managed in a way that takes into account specific local circumstances while also helping to overcome the national view in analyzing the past. We are now expanding our pilot study on the Finnish and Swedish bibliographies towards large-scale integration of national bibliographies in the CERL Heritage of the Printed Book Database. Such integration can help scholarship to reach a more precise view of print culture beyond the confines of national bibliographies.
Future perspectives.
Deals with the historic setting as well as with the contemporary.