Between the disappearance of provincial publishing in the 1610s and the advent of music engraving around 1660, the Ballard typographic workshop enjoyed a virtual monopoly on music publishing in France. This study surveys and describes the 650 editions published by this workshop under the direction of Pierre I and then Robert III Ballard, covering a period from the last flames of the Renaissance (Orlando de Lassus, Claude Lejeune, Eustache Du Caurroy) to the dawn of the splendour of Versailles (Henry Du Mont, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers). The bibliography is complemented by summaries of the workshop, family, repertoire, techniques and bibliographical sources. Extensive incipit indexes enable us to search for different forms of the same work, as well as concordances with other manuscript sources.

Since his doctoral thesis in 1986, Laurent Guillo has devoted his musicological research to printed and manuscript sources of the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as to the history of libraries and music collections.