Bibliothèque bleue

Bibliothèque bleue ("blue library" in French) is a type of ephemera and popular literature published in Early Modern France (between c. 1602 and c. 1830), comparable to the English chapbook and the German Volksbuch.

The term Bibliothèque bleue originates in a publishing scheme introduced 1602 in Troyes by the brothers Jean and Nicolas Oudot, in association with the family of Claude Garnier, who had been printer to the king.

[2] The content matter was at first limited to local ephemera, but it was soon popularized and imitated in other cities such as Rouen, Angers, Caen, Limoges, Avignon, Dinan, Épinal, sold in urban bookshops and taken into the countryside by itinerant colporteurs (peddlers).

[4] In 1665, Nicolas III married the daughter of a Paris bookseller and established himself in the capital, and began to publish in great quantities, on subject matters including theatre, storybook (especially prose retellings of medieval verse novels such as Fierabras, Robert le Diable, and Jean de Paris), satire (roman picaresque), religious literature, almanacs, manuals on etiquette, cookbooks, songbooks and astrology.

Garnier persisted into the Republican era, but went bankrupt 1830, as their business model had become outdated and could no longer compete with modern forms of printing publishing led by Louis Hachette, and as a result of the centralization of the primary educational system.