This paper explores the culture of co-authorship in eighteenth-century botany, focusing on the practice of posthumous publishing and the publication trajectory of the papers and illustrations left by the French botanist Charles Plumier (1646-1704). In 1689 Plumier had travelled through Martinique and St. Domingue in order to investigate the pharmaceutical uses of the flora of the French Antilles. He had brought back a rich haul of descriptions and drawings, and he worked fast to have them published. Within ten years, three illustrated botanical works had come out. Yet they contained only a small part of what he had gathered. When he died much of this botanical material, eagerly awaited by the botanical community, was still unpublished. As the information economy of botany tried to prevent the loss of precious data, other botanists took on the task of editing Plumier’s manuscripts. Several authors were involved in a publishing process, whose aim was less to make the material available to the botanical community in an original version than to update and correct it.The resulting layering of information shaped not only the appearance of the published text, but also far-reaching forms of scientific co-authorship.
