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Summaries
Piet Verkruijsse, Moeilijk en dogmatisch, maar wel buitengewoon rijk. Verleden, heden en toekomst van de analytische bibliografie
[Difficult and dogmatic, but exceptionally rich indeed. Past, present and future of analytical bibliography]
Digitizing all printed information will be inevitable, because anyone anywhere should have all information at his disposal. The problem of the uniformity and authorisation of that information will increase proportionally as a result. Everybody is now publisher, compositor and editor all in one. The publishing of printed books may come to an end, the editing of texts will not. This implies that the editor of a text will need to know all about the history of his text and that he will need the co-operation of the analytical bibliographer to reconstruct the history of a particular edition.
Recognition of the importance of analytical bibliography - the study of the printed book as a material object - for interpreting and editing printed texts is slow in spreading, both in a geographic and in a scholarly sense. That is peculiar, because the history of the discipline goes back a long time. As early as the eighteenth century Michel Maittaire in France and Georg Wolfgang Panzer in Germany made attempts to ascribe incunabula to a particular printer.
The New Bibliography, originating from Shakespearean philology, with scholars like A.W. Pollard, W.W. Greg and R.B. McKerrow, got its ‘Bible’ in the form of Fredson Bowers' Principles of bibliographical description (1949), a standard work which - like all Bibles - raised conflicting reactions. To what extent analytical bibliography originated from philology, is evident when one looks for analytical bibliographical publications in the field of other scholarly disciplines. That is peculiar also because historians, art historians, theologians et cetera handle printed sources from the hand press period daily.
Meanwhile a new discipline developed: the history of the book, which claims a place next to so many other historical disciplines like the history of ideas and cultural history. The history of the book mainly engages in distribution, consumption and reception, far less in production.
In my opinion the future of analytical bibliography lies in the aim for which it has been invented: the analysis of the printed book as a material object, apart from all possible auxiliary scholarly use it may have to other disciplines. Because the analytical bibliographer has to dig back from the copies of books that have come down to us (the potsherds of the total impression), it is probably better to use the term archaeology of the book rather than analytical bibliography, which supposes that after analysis there will follow a description, the printing history of a specific edition.
An archaeologist of the book should do more than merely reconstruct a printing history; his research may supply general data about procedures in printing houses by way of supplements to the old printing manuals, which are incomplete or which describe an ideal situation. The archaeologist of the book doesn't aim to compile a descriptive bibliography of a writer, a genre or a period, nor to compile a short-title catalogue. The only logical aim is to deliver a monograph about a printer-publisher.
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Ad Leerintveld, Constantijn Huygens en de kopij voor zijn Otiorum libri sex [Constantijn Huygens and the copy for his Otiorum libri sex]
Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) is a key figure for the study of cultural life in the seventeenth-century Republic of the United Netherlands. His poetry is highly regarded both for its thematic concerns and its formal aspects. No other seventeenth-century Dutch poet has left behind such a prodigious quantity of manuscript material, or has been so actively involved in the typographical representation of his work. This article deals with the reconstructed copy for Huygens's first collection of poetry, his Otiorum libri sex (1625). It shows the way Huygens prepared his copy for the press, including his designs for the title-pages, layout and typeface.
The first work of Constantijn Huygens to be published was an occasional poem in French: the lament Larmes sur la mort de feu Monsieur Maurice de Nassau (1617). It appeared without a printer's name or address. The correspondence between Constantijn and his brother Maurits reveals the publishing history of this poem - issued by Aert van Meuris in The Hague, who also became the printer of the Otiorum libri sex - and also indicates Huygens's familiarity with the process of printing in a seventeenth-century printing shop.
The reconstructed copy of the Otiorum libri sex consists of printed sheets of occasional poetry and of manuscripts Huygens prepared for the press. His remarks to his compositors and the corrections and alterations in the copy are written in a brown ink, which can easily be distinguished from the greyish black of the first handwritten drafts. Of the 119 poems published in the historical-critical edition of Huygens's Dutch poems from 1614-1625, no less than 75 can be characterized as copy. They show the fingerprints of the compositors and the sometimes very detailed instructions by Huygens. For some of his poems Huygens outlined the layout and the type in which he wished to see his poetry published. He also designed the title-pages. In respect of his involvement with the typography of his books Constantijn Huygens turns out to be unique in early modern Dutch history.
Marja Smolenaars, Detectivewerk: in Nederland gedrukte boeken met een Engels impressum 1600-1730
[Detective work: Books printed in the Netherlands with an English imprint 1600-1730]
Trade relations between Dutch and English booksellers and publishers encompassed more than the straightforward buying and selling of each other's publications. In the early seventeenth century, the political and religious restraints put on the publishing business in England forced authors and booksellers to look abroad for the printing of their works. In comparison, the climate for the book trade in the Netherlands was far less repressive, and many works for the English market were printed there. Another, less known reason for having books printed in the Netherlands was a commercial one. The monopoly of the Stationers' Company in London prevented a free market, with the result that prices in England of printed material were high and the quality low. The Dutch, on the other hand, were able to produce good quality work at competitive prices. Not only did English publishers order complete editions of books to be printed across the Channel, they also bought substantial shares of editions with their own imprint on the title-page.
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Lack of archival sources makes it almost impossible to determine whether an English publisher was (financially) involved in the planning of an edition before printing, or just bought up a certain number of copies afterwards. Dutch publishers are known to have offered to print a title-page with the buyer's name in the imprint if he bought a substantial number of copies, so that an English address in the imprint cannot be used to prove that the buyer had a financial share in the project's planning. There are, however, a few sources that can shed some light on the relations between English and Dutch booksellers in the later seventeenth century, one of which is the letter-book of the London publisher/bookseller Samuel Smith, now held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It contains incoming letters from some of Smith's continental colleagues, from which we can reconstruct the strategies he used to obtain books with his own imprint from the Netherlands. In cases where no such revealing letters exist, however, bibliographical research is the only means by which we can determine whether a publication with an English address in the imprint is in fact printed in the Netherlands. A very useful tool is the stcn-fingerprint, which enables the researcher to compare editions which are not physically at the same location. Much more detective work has to be undertaken to get a fuller picture of the extent of the use English publishers made of their contacts with their Dutch colleagues.
Nelleke Moser, Overdroomde dromen. Haring van Harinxma (1604-1669) als vertaler van Quevedo's Sueños
[Visions revised. Haring van Harinxma (1604-1661) as translator of Quevedo's Sueños]
The satirical ‘dreams’ (Sueños, 1627) of the Spanish author Francisco de Quevedo Villegas were very popular throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. In these stories, Quevedo unmasks the world's hypocrisy by describing a journey through hell, a discussion with a man who is possessed by the devil et cetera. Among the many Dutch translations, the first one by the Frisian nobleman Haring van Harinxma was the most successful. After its appearance in 1641 it was republished several times, as late as the 1780s. This relatively unknown writer deserves to be studied because his work sheds light onto an important aspect of the seventeenth-century booktrade: the production of translations.
This article argues that the success of this translation is due to the careful way in which Van Harinxma made the text suitable for the Dutch public. In spite of what has been suggested, he did not revise much. According to his own words, he refrained from major changes because he preferred to hold the author responsible for the relentless exposure of bad habits. Most of the differences between the Spanish original and the Dutch translation are caused by the French intermediary translation Van Harinxma used. He himself only adapted those passages that would really be unacceptable for his calvinist audience, for example those where Calvin and Luther were depicted in hell.
Van Harinxma's translation can be considered as a product of the Frisian court culture as it has been described by Ph. Breuker: the environment of noblemen surrounding stadholder Willem Frederik of Friesland, that was characterized by calvinism, cultural versatility and a resentment about the ascendancy of Holland. Van Harinxma's translation was first published by the famous publisher Claude Fonteyne, who played a central part in the Frisian cultural scene, and was dedicated to the painter Wybrand de Geest, who made portraits of various people at
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the Frisian court. Van Harinxma, commander in the army of the stadholder, weighed his words and smoothed the Spanish satire into a Dutch morality.
Elisabeth Meyer, ‘By den drukker dezes is ook gedrukt en te bekomen’. Een verkennend onderzoek naar stocklijsten in Nederlandse uitgaven in de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw [‘Also printed and to be had by this publisher’. An exploration of stocklists in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century editions from the Northern Netherlands]
Although many book historians have analysed booksellers' catalogues, little attention has so far been given to stocklists published within the books itself. This article focuses on two fundamental aspects regarding stocklists in editions originating from the Northern Netherlands up to 1800. Firstly, the earliest publications of these stocklists are examined. Secondly, quantitative aspects of the usage of these promotional tools are surveyed in-depth.
Information provided by the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands shows that stocklists appeared, although infrequently, as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. Stocklists that promoted solely the work of one author, the so-called ‘commercial oeuvre lists’, were in some cases even used in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, only since the last quarter of the seventeenth century have these stocklists been in common use for advertising by the book trade. From 1725 onwards over 3% of all editions published in the Northern Netherlands contained these kinds of stocklists. It is striking that publications in French are supplied with stocklists far more often than books in Dutch or Latin. Partly this seems to be due to the nature of books in which stocklists mostly tend to occur, namely the smaller books in octavo or duodecimo in, for example, literary or ‘general knowledge’ genres.
Obviously, stocklists can have the same research value as the more often studied booksellers' catalogues, e.g. for reconstructing the stock of a certain publisher. The advantage of stocklists on spare pages in books, however, is that they can give information about the stock or book production of especially the smaller booksellers, who didn't publish separate catalogues.
Rietje van Vliet, Nederlandse boekverkopers op de Buchmesse te Leipzig in de achttiende eeuw
[Dutch booksellers at the Buchmesse in Leipzig in the eighteenth century]
It is usually taken for granted, on the basis of the often quoted quantitative study of the origins of the books which have been sold at the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig (G. Schwetschke, Codex nundinarius Germaniae literatae bisecularis. Halle 1850-1877), that a lot of Dutch booksellers in the eighteenth century frequented the book fair at Leipzig with merchandise of their own. However, the so-called Insinuationsprotokolle, which had to be signed by the booksellers if they agreed with the summoned privileges, demonstrate that only a few Dutch booksellers took much trouble and went to far-away Leipzig, the ‘intellectual staple market of Europe’. They did not think the trouble and expense were warranted by the benefits.
The vast majority of booksellers was represented by a commissionaire. Certainly in the first half of the eighteenth century these commissionaires were mostly Dutch booksellers who owned a branch in Leipzig or elsewhere in Germany. Gradually German booksellers took over
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this commission selling. The book fair itself decreased in frequency and became more local.
The investigation by Schwetschke, therefore, is not a good source to present the international trade between Dutch and German booksellers in the eighteenth century. Nor are the fair catalogues themselves. It is also impossible to study the import and export trade of books by means of tax data in the Republic, because of their incompleteness and unreliability. Some limited conclusions can, however, be based on the catalogues of individual booksellers. The catalogues of the Leiden bookseller Elie Luzac for example seem to indicate that during the eighteenth century the import from Germany into the Republic surpassed more and more the import from France and England.
L.G. Saalmink, Hieronymus van Alphen en het raadsel van de Wo(e)rtman-drukken [Hieronymus van Alphen and the mystery of the Wo(e)rtman editions]
Immediately after the publication in 1778 by the Utrecht publisher Van Terveen of the Proeve van kleine gedigten voor kinderen (‘Sample of small poems for children’) by Hieronymus van Alphen, pirate editions were issued by other publishers, mostly in Amsterdam. This article deals with the pirate editions of the publishers Goejet, Woertman, Koene and Wortman.
Since most of the pirate editions are undated, their sequence had to be established by studying the variant readings of the text of the editions. It turned out that the undated editions issued by Wortman were published in the first half of the nineteenth century, but at that time apparently there were no other bookselling or publishing activities by Wortman. Because the publication of pirate editions was prohibited since 1803, it seems that one or more publishers used the name of Wortman as a disguise for the marketing of their own pirate editions. The most probable candidate for being the real publisher of these pirate editions of Van Alphen's poetry for children is the firm of Noman from the provincial town of Zaltbommel.
Jacques Dane, ‘De machtigste uitgeefster’. Bedrijfsvoering bij Uitgeverij Callenbach, 1880-1936
[Creating a great Protestant publishing house. Callenbach, 1880-1936]
In honour of the centenary of the Dutch Sunday School Movement in 1936, W.G. van de Hulst (1879-1963), a famous Protestant author of children's books, praised the publishing firm of Callenbach for its devotion to producing Protestant Sunday school books in the Netherlands since the late nineteenth century. This article describes the business and commercial conditions under which Callenbach saw its endeavours crowned with succes.
The catalogues of the publishing firm Callenbach were of vital importance for the distribution of the Sunday school books in the Netherlands. The catalogues informed the committees of Sunday schools, Christian day schools, and Protestant youth-organisations about Callenbach's newly published children's books. By the early twentieth century, Callenbach had so many customers that the firm developed special order forms for the books in the publisher's list. The price range of Callenbach's books was another clue to its success. Book prices ranged from very cheap to rather expensive. Callenbach offered affordable books to both the poor and the wealthy. Callenbach's development was closely related to the rise and expansion of the
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Dutch Sunday School Movement. The co-operation between the oldest organisation in this field, the Nederlandse Zondagsschool Vereeniging (the Dutch Sunday School Union), and Callenbach reveals that the publisher not only focused on devotional reading matter and the Protestant cause. He was also a businessman. Callenbach became the largest Protestant publishing firm in the Netherlands.
Steven Claeyssens, ‘Een fatsoenlijk colporteur verkoopt niet’. Salomon van Raalte brengt Derkinderens Gijsbrecht van Aemstel aan de man
[‘An honest canvasser doesn't sell’. Salomon van Raalte sells Derkinderen's Gijsbrecht van Aemstel]
Still very little is known about the trade practices and the nature of the goods traded by itinerant book salesmen during the nineteenth century, mainly because this heterogeneous group of traders rarely left any accounts or other records. It is however possible to learn more about this important form of bookselling by going through the archives of established booksellers and publishing houses that employed one or more itinerant booksellers. The Dutch publishing house De Erven F. Bohn, for instance, contracted in October 1892 the experienced and well-paid top canvasser Salomon van Raalte (1844-1916) to sell one of the most famous works of the renaissance of modern Dutch book art: Derkinderen's Gijsbrecht van Aemstel. The article describes how and to whom Van Raalte sold the work, focussing on his box of tricks to deceive both subscribers and established booksellers.
Jan Pauwels, ‘Groote boeken voor weinig geld’. De publicatiegeschiedenis van Guido Gezelle's dichtwerken, 1903-1905
[‘Large books at a low price’. The publication of the collected poems of Guido Gezelle, 1903-1905]
During his lifetime, the work of the Flemish poet Guido Gezelle (1830-1899) was published by small companies on the outskirts of the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. As a result he never reached a wider audience either in his own country or the Netherlands. Soon after his death his nephew Stijn Streuvels, another famous Flemish author, managed to interest the Amsterdam publisher L.J. Veen in his uncle's writings. After a few small but successful editions, Veen and Streuvels decided to publish the collected poetry of Gezelle in ten volumes. The edition appeared on the Dutch and Belgian markets between 1903 and 1905 and was reprinted several times.
This article reconstructs the history of its publication through an analysis of the publisher's archives. It reveals information about the audience for poetry around the turn of the century, the collaboration between Dutch and Flemish publishing companies and various book marketing strategies. It appears that the collected poems were very successful in the Netherlands but failed to attract many buyers in the poet's home country Flanders, where an older edition had been available for many years. Nevertheless, the publisher continued to work for both markets. After a few years, the situation had altered so much that ‘due to the success of Gezelle in the Netherlands, he is now known to his fellow-countrymen who had never thought of him before.’
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