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. As was the case in England and Germany, the literary format appealed to all levels of French society, transcending social, sex, and age barriers.

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. Oudot produced prints in low quality and small format. Sold with a blue paper cover, these brochure-like products came to be known as livres bleus, or "blue books".

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). This wide distribution represented the historical origin of "popular mass media" in France. Later in the 17th century, the Bibliothèque bleue in Troyes became a family business run by the sons of Jean Oudot, Jean II and Jacques I, later Nicolas II and Nicolas III. The Oudot business soon encountered competition, notably by the Garnier family.

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. After the death of Nicholas II, his widow continued the Troyes business, and became known throughout the kingdom as the veuve Oudot (widow Oudot), by the 18th century attaining a near-monopoly in the genre.