Mark McConnell, "Christophe Plantin's Business Strategy," Karmiole Lecture, 9 July 2025

Rare Book School's 2025 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Lecture on the History of the Book Trades featured a talk by Mark McConnell on “Publishing in the Renaissance: Christophe Plantin’s Business Strategy." The event took place on 9 July 2025. You can watch the full recording of the lecture on YouTube at https://youtu.be/QFmRSz-laUE?feature=shared. About the Talk: Printing technology accelerated the forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation. But it also created a major new business problem: publishing risk. A publisher had to spend large sums of money to print a book before knowing how well it would sell. The publisher’s decision whether to accept this risk was a gateway through which all printed books had to pass. Mark McConnell has been investigating Christophe Plantin’s business records from the 1560s, still intact after 460 years. These records document in remarkable detail the activities of Europe’s largest printer at the time and make it possible to quantify the cost of individual books and the risk taken in publishing them. Applying modern business concepts to the data, McConnell will offer insights on key issues in publishing strategy: what types of books were printed, why books were produced in the forms we now see, how production costs shaped competition in the marketplace, and the steps that publishers took to control and reduce risk. About the Speaker: Mark McConnell comes to his historical research from his legal career, which he spent as a partner with the global law firm Hogan Lovells. McConnell specialized in international trade disputes, where he litigated questions like the competitive dynamics of industries and the efficiency of industrial processes. He applies the tools he developed in legal disputes to Christophe Plantin’s business records, examining Plantin’s operations from the perspective of modern business strategy. McConnell holds both a law degree and a master’s in business administration from Stanford University and did his undergraduate work in economics at Johns Hopkins University. He is now affiliated with Johns Hopkins again, where he is Associate Research Fellow at the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Renaissance Book.