Making Books to Form Readers Denis Janot's Recycled Images and the Materiality of Reading in Sixteenth-Century France

This essay examines the prolific use of woodcut images by Denis Janot, a well-known and successful sixteenth-century printer-publisher. It argues that the repetition and reuse of images both within and among books on Janot's list served as a form of branding that connected the reader not to one individual work but to the larger corpus of works produced by this industrious and skilled libraire. In this period, the book was not yet a familiar object to its users; in linking the recycling of images solely to economic and practical exigencies, scholars have misconstrued this practice and its import for publishing and reading. Such recycling of woodcuts can be better understood as a way to familiarize and form readers at the very earliest moments of establishing economic and sociocultural viability for the early modern French printed book.