The so-called "Basle Map" of Paris (also known as the Truchet-Hoyau map) offers an accurate rendering of Paris's streets in the mid-16th century, and indicates the capital's most prominent public buildings, educational establishments and religious institutions. This makes it a useful map for locating bookshops, printers' workshops and type foundries that were active in Paris in 1540, when Claude Garamont began his career as a type punch-cutter.
An examination of Philippe Renouard's
Répertoire des imprimeurs parisiens (1898, reviewed and corrected in 1965 by Brigitte Moreau and Jeanne Veyrin-Forrer) reveals 150 individuals active in the book trade in 1540, including their addresses. To locate the townhouses in question, we drew on the
Topographie historique du Vieux Paris – begun in the 1860s by Adolphe Berty – which provided the location of a few shop signs.
Although it provides an accurate view of the streets of Paris, the Basel Map does not depict the reality of the built environment – there were many more houses than those appearing on the map (which are included only for aesthetic reasons). Because of this, the map is of necessity inaccurate, but it is useful for perceiving the distribution and the spatial relationships between the various bookshops.
We can see that the vast majority of shops were clustered around two main hubs: the Palace on the Ile de la Cité and the Eglise Saint-Benoît in the Rue Saint-Jacques. A few outlying shops were located near the Boulevard Saint-Germain, or outside the city walls in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel.
Fac-similé du plan de Truchet-Hoyau conservé à la Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris. ©G. Leyris/ BHVP
