Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the development of the book collection of Cardinal Bernardino Spada in the competitive environment of Baroque Rome. It explores communities of collecting in seventeenth-century Norfolk. The book explains the relationship of two eminent Englishmen of the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. It also examines the library of Thomas Mostyn of Gloddaith in North Wales. The book offers a study of Johnson's five-volume Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae of 1743-1745. It describes booksellers and readership in the Luso-Brazilian world of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book focuses on French and English reference books as a case study in cross-cultural exchanges in the Atlantic during the age of the French Revolution when the Portuguese book trade responded to state censorship and operated within a colonial system.