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Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1977 (1977)

Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw. Jaargang 1977

(1977)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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III. Aspects of the booktrade between England and the Low Countries in the eigtheenth century

The Englishman visiting the Hague in 1754 was advised by a current English language guidebook as follows: ‘Strangers that like to know what is carried on in the Learned world among men of letters may spend his leisure hours in a booksellers shop, few of them but what understands, besides his mother tongue, one or two languages, Latin, French, or English. Amongst these booksellers is one whose name is Scheurleer. He keeps a publick Library of all sorts of books in various languages, where anyone that likes to read may have what book he pleases, either to buy or to have it lent at a civil price. He speaks the French and English very well and seems to delight in being useful to a stranger.’1) You will of course have understood that the publisher of the guidebook quoted above was Hendrik Scheurleer himself, giving no little advertisement to his shop ‘upon the Plain’. At the same time he illustrates for us both the attraction of foreign bookshops for the itinerant Englishman and the availability of English books on the Continent.

 

The English book trade was naturally connected with that of the European mainland from the beginning and in the year when we celebrate the introduction of the art of printing to England by William Caxton in 1476 one is glad to recognise whence the new technology came. The early English printers were indeed frequently Dutch, French or German and the importation of books flourished in the early sixteenth century. Religious and political control tried to stem this and about 1600 the official Stationers' Company endeavoured for a while to import foreign books through its so-called Latin stock. This official channel did not work well but by the mid seventeenth century cheaper Dutch production methods, partly due to cheaper paper, had enabled the considerable English Bible market to fall completely into Dutch hands.2)

 

The restoration of Charles II saw both an easing of the official attitude to imports and a revival of the English university presses, active in particular in the

Bible market. In 1710 the traveller von Uffenbach remarked that Dutch books were almost a third cheaper than equivalent English productions. More specific evidence comes from the notebook of Thomas Bennet and Henry Clements, edited by the late Cyprian Blagden and Norma Hodgson (now Lady Dalrymple Champneys).3) Bennet and Clements were London booksellers dealing in the period 1686-1706, particularly with Van der Aa of Leiden, and the evidence of their trade can be filled out with that found in the letters written by foreign booksellers to Samuel Smith, another London bookseller, and which cover 1683 to 1692.

 

From these sources we see that the British were mainly concerned with buying foreign editions of the classics and sacred texts together with new Latin books on history or antiquity generally. Often a hundred copies could be ordered and for a duo-decimo edition of Cornelius Nepos the figure could rise to eight hundred. New books on mathematics, physics and medicine were also acquired. Wars seem not so much to have interrupted trade but rather to have made it slower and more risky but the interest in continental book auctions was considerable and catalogues for important sales could be in demand up to four months before the sale itself. The continental market for English productions was on the other hand more restricted, partly perhaps because of language difficulties. Books sold were again mainly in Latin although equally scientific books always maintend a steady sale.

 

The Bennett and Clements notebook is an important glimpse into the relations of a London bookseller with his continental, Dutch, fellows but the majority of its interest really lies in the evidence it provides on the London trade itself and on how the wholesale association known as a Conger really worked. After the Bennett and Clements period in the 1690s further information on the foreign trade is rare and apart from some occasional letters and comments perhaps surprisingly little evidence has survived. We know from reviews and announcements in the press that books arrived in England prompty after publication - and even, as with

Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloise, where the Dutch original edition was held up by the French authorities, sooner there than in Paris. We also know, or are beginning to know, the names of the main English booksellers importing books.4)

 

Among the early giants here were the French protestant refugee brothers Isaac (d. 1753) and Paul (d. 1738) Vaillant, succeeded in the second part of the century by Paul's son, Paul II, who only died in 1802. The Dutch connection includes the fact that for some years prior to 1727 Isaac Vaillant seems also to have been in Rotterdam. Associated with the firm was Nicholas Prevost who married the elder Vaillant sister.5) From 1715 Johannes Groenewegen, a Dutchman, also played an important part in the Anglo-Dutch trade as we shall see and indeed in the twenties and thirties a number of Dutch names are found briefly in the English records. From the middle thirties however, these disappear until the short but very important association of Pieter Abraham De Hondt with Thomas Beckett in 1760, which, while it seems only to have lasted for eight years until 1768, established Beckett as the major London importer of continental books in the later years of the eighteenth century.

 

Slightly earlier, in the middle period from the late thirties, the main English importer was probably John Nourse who was active as a bookseller from 1731 until his death in 1780.6) Nourse specialized in publishing and selling scientific and foreign books and appears to have been so well known for the latter that from as early as 1738 his name was used like that of Pierre Marteau of Cologne, as a false imprint. There are works published with imprints such as ‘Toujours à Londres, chez l'étérnel Jean Nourse’ and ‘Ou? chez le grand éditeur Jean Nourse’ but these false attributions must not blind one to his very real existence and activity. Like many other people he had an officially exclusive agency contract with Pieter Gosse at the Hague but this does not seem to have prevented him from buying regularly, by exchange account, from the Luchtmans in Leiden as swell, and here we are fortunate in that the Luchtmans' remarkable archives allow us to see the workings of this exchange business from 1745 to 1780.7)

Trade of a sort was conducted regularly throughout the period although the busiest times were undoubtedly the early seventeen sixties and seventies. Each partner seems to have ordered in his own way: Nourse ordering regularly twice a year, usually in spring and autumn, while the Luchtmans usually did so only once a year in either summer or winter, although when they did make two orders a year these were equally spring and autumn ones. The number of titles ordered was higher on the Luchtmans' side while Nourse made up on several occasions by ordering fifty or even a hundred copies of a work. The period between the financial settling of accounts varied, the first settling being in 1749, about a year after the end of the War of Austrian Succession. The 1750 accounts were settled the following year but it would almost seem as if a three year period were then agreed. However the very brisk trade during the Seven Years War interrupted this and finally both the accounts for 1754-56 and those for 1756-65 were only settled in 1765. Perhaps this established confidence even further as the next settlement was equally ten years later in 1775, only a few years before Nourse's death.

 

The busiest period, as indicated, was that of the Seven Years War, 1756 to 1763, and particularly the years 1759-62. During this time Nourse received 372 works at an estimated value of 1,785 guilders while the Luchtmans received 408 works valued at 1,619 guilders. This leaves one with the perhaps surprising statistical result that English books appear to have been cheaper than Dutch ones (3.9 guilders per volume against 4.8 for Dutch ones), but too much reliance can evidently not be placed on this since the nature of the books ordered by each bookseller needs to be taken into consideration and since one must also remember that this was largely an exchange account and some ordering may have been done deliberately to balance it.

 

However it is interesting to see that in fact the type of books supplied by each side was largely the same, consisting of an almost equal amount for classical studies and for the sciences and a rather smaller amount of novels or philosophical reading, the Dutch

perhaps preferring science slightly while the English stressed classical studies. For example the book of which the Luchtmans supplied the most copies was outstandingly their reprint of Johannes Buxtorfius the elder's Epitome grammaticae Hebraeae, first published in 1653, and of which over 250 copies were supplied between 1750 and 1762. Thomas Erpenius's Grammatica Arabica cum fabulis Lokmani, edited by A. Schultens for the Luchtmans in 1748, was also notably popular and a Hebrew Bible could apparently expect a good sale. Classical texts were popular, Erasmus' Colloquia heading the list followed by more recent works such as Stephan Bergler's Aristophanes (ordinary and large paper copies ordered) and naturally David Ruhnken's important Lexicon vocum Platonicarum (1754). The works of Ruhnken's great predecessor in the chair of Eloquence and History at Leyden, Franz van Oudendorp, were of course much in demand, notably the Ceasar, Lucan and Suetonius. On the scientific side orders were particularly for various works by Boerhaave and for Petrus van Musschenbroek's Oratio de methodo instituendi experimenta physica. If there is only one mention of that other great Dutch scientist of the period, 's Gravesande, works written and published in Leiden do appear, such as J.D. Gaubius' Institutiones pathologiae medicinalis (1758) and Petrus Luchtmans' Specimen physico-medicum inaugurale de saporibus et de gustu (also 1758). Linnaeus' recent visit to England would doubtless have ensured the interest behind an order for the Hortus Cliffortianus of 1757 but other works by European scientists were evidently also ordered through the Low Countries. A regular favourite was Albrecht von Haller and there was naturally interest in C.N. Jacquier and J. Le Seuer's commented edition of Newton's Principia published in Geneva between 1739 and 1742. The publications of the Berlin and Russian academies were also supplied by the Luchtmans and the various issues of J.G. Gmelin's Flora Sibirica were all received. In some cases it would seem however that a few of these works were not sold in England as some feature equally, a year or two after the original entry, in the list of books sent, or in this case sent back, to the Luchtmans By Nourse.

Classical studies were also well to the fore in the lists of British publications supplied by Nourse including particularly the commentaries of John Davies, President of Queen's College, Cambridge, on Cicero and Thomas Mangey's Philo Judaeus, an edition which apparently really owed much to the Swede Erik Benzelius. On the scientific side there were of course regular despatches of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, both in full and abridged forms, and numerous others of Thomas Simpson's various works on trigonometry and algebra, all of which were actually published by Nourse. Other works included William Gould's Account of English ants (1747), George Watson on the natural history of uncommon birds, Sir William Watson on the power of electricity, and Professor Colin McLaurin's posthumous Account of Sir Isaac Newton's philosophical discoveries (1748), another work published by Nourse and for which the long list of subscribers included both the Princess of Wales and the Prince of Orange. Medical works were well represented from Mead on to other practical ones, such as the Observations on the diseases of the army by the President of the Royal Society, Sir John Pringle, and to more theoretical ones like those of Robert Whytt on vital and involuntary motions or to George Young's researches into opium. Whytt was Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh and Young was also an Edinburgh man and so taken together with orders for the Pharmacopeia Edinburgensis, that school was as well represented through a London bookseller as it was by Scottish students at Leiden. A regular favourite seems to have been the pseudonymous John Green's Chart of North and South America, first published by Bradock Mead in 1753. The most regular best seller seems however to have been, rather surprisingly, Nourse's own edition of Grotius, De veritate religionis Chritianae (1755) supplied in various quantities for nearly twenty years during which time no modern Dutch edition was apparently available.8)

 

An interesting factor in this on the whole very serious and academic trade is that until at least the later seventeen sixties no novels or lighter literature are mentioned. Nourse undoubtedly dealt in

foreign novels and was probably the publisher of the earliest and most complete text of Candide but there is nothing in this class until in 1766 Nourse sends copies of a Ladies complete letter writer and of Fielding's History of Tom Jones. Almost every year from then on Richardson (Pamela, Grandison, Clarissa Harlow), Fielding (Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia) and the Tatler all feature regularly. Both major writers were by then available in either French or Dutch but it is an interesting proof of the more firmly established popularity of English literature that English language editions were then required.9) More difficult to understand perhaps are the 1772 entries for copies of Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise and it is possible that these were returned stock. However the entries the same year for the Aventures de Gil Blas and for Don Quichotte are almost certainly for genuine Nourse editions and the note next to the Cervantes saying ‘Espagne’ suggest amazingly that the order was for onward transmission of a cheap edition to Spain.

 

Similarly less academic or more ‘philosophical’ works only occur in the Luchtman's consignment to England from 1770. In that year six copies of Helvetius' De l'esprit figure along with Contes des fées, Le Maître de Claville's Traité du vrai merite, Marivaux's Paysan parvenu and the Lettres de quelques juifs à Voltaire. Later we also find Toussaint's Les moeurs. It is evident that most of these works are not avant garde sales but represent later reprints of now established works required for stock. By 1770 the intellectual atmosphere has clearly changed. It is perhaps disappointing not to find mention in 1759 of Candide or in 1762 of the Nouvelle Heloise but the Luchtmans/Nourse trade was clearly different and more of a testimony to the importance of Anglo-Dutch eighteenth century classical and scientific interest.10)

 

It should also be noted in passing that not only did Dutch booksellers sometimes establish themselves in London and English ones abroad but native booksel-

lers also visited each other's countries. John Nourse was certainly in the Hague in 1742 and Johannes Luchtmans visited England for five weeks in 1772. Travelling from Hellevoetsluys to Harwich he visited Colchester, London, Oxford (calling on the famous Hebrew scholar, Dr. Kennicott), Windsor, and Cambridge. Various booksellers are mentioned briefly in his manuscript account, including references to spending the day with John Nourse, but unfortunately no further details are given.11) However the visit was clearly not without some small success for fourteen new accounts for English booksellers, albeit shortlived, appear in the Luchtmans Bookverkopers book at this point.

 

However fascinating and valuable such personal descriptions are and useful as individual financial accounts may be one is often left with little firm idea of the genaral trading position overall. In the old English phrase, one can not see the wood for the trees. Hitherto historians of the book trade have had ro rely on such individual accounts and on the occasional surviving generalisations found in correspondence. The recent trend to a more statistically based approach can however be used here as well and, in England at least, we are fortunate in having some useful figures for the eighteenth century. The end of the system of farming out the British Customs in 1671 led to various reforms and the rising interest in mercantilist economics and political arithmetic encouraged our Board of Customs in 1696 to appoint an officer charged with keeping general accounts of imports and exports, thus establishing the basis of the modern trade statistics.12) These records, as yet largely unpublished and summarising the total quantities of each type of goods received from, or sent to, each foreign country each year survive in a nearly unbroken sequence from 1701 to 1780 after which there is a gap of twenty years before the run of more general, published, statistics in the nineteenth century. The entries are not easy to interpret and further work is clearly required before they can be used with complete assurance. Nevertheless they do seem to provide a most important and fascinating comparative source of trade history. These very large registers give the total weights (or numbers)

and value of all goods imported and exported through the ‘imports’ (London) and ‘outports’ (the other ports). They include an enormous variety of goods; drugs, marble, hair, vermicelli, pictures (by the square foot), frames, paper (many varieties listed), and of course books. For imports figures are given seperately for ‘Books bound’ and ‘Books unbound’, the former being in early years sometimes called ‘Books old’ and being estimated at one pound value per hundredweight while books unbound (and arguably newer) were valued at eight pounds sterling per hundredweight. No distinction between bound and unbound is made for exports which are all valued at four pounds per hundredweight.

 

Last year I used these figures in an attempt to sketch the overall relations of the English booktrade with the various countries of Europe, with the various pre-Independence plantations in North America and the Caribbean, and with the sudden and dramatically important new English market in India.13) On the continental side pride of place naturally belonged to Holland, throughout so much of the eighteenth century the centre of the Western European market for books, and I would now like to look at the Anglo-Dutch trade from 1700 to 1780 through these statistics in more detail.

 

In general in this period Holland was the immediate source (and I stress that these figures are based on the country of immediate origin which is evidently not necessarily that of production) of over thirty per cent of the bound books received in England and that of some sixty-one per cent of unbound books. France, as Britain's second supplier, provided nearly as many bound books but only a third of the Dutch unbound ones. Italy and Venice together were Britain's third supplier with Flanders and Germany equally fourth. As one might expect the Dutch figures are outstandingly stronger in the earlier period while the French gain ground later.

 

The division of British imports into bound and un-

bound books undoubtedly reflects two different markets and the factors affecting the rise and fall of these markets certainly differ. The unbound, or new book, market is in many ways a more regular one varying more immediately with political and economic conditions (Table 1). Thus the early war years vary within a small range except for 1708 when there is a very high figure for which I can as yet not account. Post war recovery is slow and further set back by the economic troubles associated with the South Sea Bubble in 1720. The general British economic boom starting in 1725 is well reflected with but few drops and is maintained into the early years of the War of Austrian Succession. The latter years of this war seem to have hit all British trade hard and while much recovered in the following interwar years, including books, the Dutch trade seems paradoxically not to have done well but rather again to have benefited in the following period of the Seven Years War. Naturally therefore the general recovery in the mid seventeen sixties led to a lower Dutch figure, underlying perhaps the weakened competitive element in the Dutch trade seen markedly here from the mid seventeen forties.

 

With regard to bound, or older, books the position was apparently different (Table II). Here the trade during the War of Spanish Succession was outstandingly weak but the recovery afterwards was good except for a drop following the South Sea Bubble. The seventeen twenty-five economic boom produces outstanding results and can, for once in a way, be related to specific trade transactions. The years 1723 to 1732 are those of very considerable auction sale activity in London, as can be shown from the British Museum's Catalogue of sale catalogues, and it would seem that much of the material came through Holland. The Lomenie de Brienne, Magliabecchi and Flechiers sales, amongst others, were held by Messrs. Woodman and Lyons and in the case of these or Tom Ballard's sales the immediate route of French consignments is not sure but could well have been through Holland. A group of Dutch booksellers were however certainly at work as well. The first in the field was Johannes Groenewegen, apparently established from 1715 at the sign of Horace in the Strand



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Table I




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Table II


together with Abraham Van den Hoek. Groenewegen's early catalogues all favoured Latin titles such as Biblotheca librorum maxime insignium - lately imported from abroad - Bibliotheca selecta or exquisitissima. The named sales include the libraries of ‘Mr d'Alone, secretary to William III’ (Professor Vercruysse suggests to me that this may be Godard van Reede, Comte d'Athlone), Johann Winckler of Hamburg, J.T. Heinson and H.H. Van der Marck. All trace of his activity ceases after 1728. His sometime partner Van den Hoek remained active, selling the libraries of E. Rouse of Deventer, of J. Vallensius, the Chancellor of the Supreme Court of Holland, and, outstandingly, part of that of the great Jean Baptiste Colbert (1729), until he apparently moved to Hamburg in 1734. Another foreign bookseller, Herman Noorthouck, also held a number of sales, ‘at his house in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden’, in the period 1729 to 1734. Most of these booksellers seem to have left England by 1735 but the high figure for that year may be attributable to further installments of the Colbert library and to that of J.B. Bignon sold by T. Osborn in London in November. It will also be of interest that part of the great Boerhaave's books were sold in London by Isaac Van den Hoeck in 1739.

 

This burst of auction activity in England in the late twenties and mid thirties whereby large and important continental collections, Italian, French and Dutch, were sold in London, often through the agency of Dutch booksellers, deserves further attention in connection with bibliophily and the history of libraries as well as for its importance in the development of the book trade. In the following years the War of Austrian Succession hit European trade generally very hard and had a quicker and more radical effect on the Dutch antiquarian trade than on the novelties. The French, who had been very slow to take up the auction as a method of disposing of large libraries, did so with gathering momentum from the seventeen forties and it is very noticeable that hardly any further large continental collections were sold by auction in England from the outbreak of that war to that of the French Revolution.

Similarly, apart from a very brief postwar recovery in 1742, the figures for bound Dutch imports to Britain remain at the low wartime level for the rest of our period. In general then the War of Austrian Succession inaugurated a permanent reduction in British book imports from Holland, probably symptomatic of the increasing challenge to the established Dutch domination of the European book trade.

 

The figures for Dutch imports of British books (Table III) are perhaps more difficult to interpret. The early war years show a healthy if up and down movement possibly due to war association and interest. Recovery awaited until after the South Sea Bubble and can be associated both with the renewal of English commercial prosperity and with the advent of new writers such as Pope, Bolingbroke, Swift, Young, all fairly immediately popular on the Continent. The rise and fall before and at the beginning of the War of Austrian Succession may counterbalance each other; the effect of the war is again marked; and the phenomenally high figures immediately after are presumably similarly compensatory. However the high Seven Years War figures and the reasonably higher level after it point to a sustained increase in the sale of English books abroad.

 

In concluding this survey it is hardly necessary to stress the close nature of Anglo-Dutch ties in the eighteenth century. The founder of my own Institution, the English architecht, Sir Robert Taylor, was a consultant to the wealthy Dutch family, the Van Necks, and advised them for their country residence in Norfolk, Heveningham Hall.14) Equally it has been suggested that the popularisation of science in the Netherlands - of which we saw evidence in the importation of English scientific books and which flowers of course with the foundation of the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in 1752 - may have been sparked off by the visit of the Oxford Huguenot scientist John Desaguliers in 1729.15) In the booktrade itself we have seen that there was some cross channel emigration- outstandingly by Groenewegen and De Hondt - and a number of close and regular links including personal visits. The eighteenth



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Table III


century however saw considerable changes and while we have today considered the Anglo-Dutch booktrade almost in isolation this is perhaps a slightly false perspective. England started the century as an importer of books but with the expansion of the new English-speaking worlds in America and India she ended it as a considerable exporter. The traditional pattern was clearly changing and the high Dutch exports of new books in the first half on the century fall consistently in the second half, probably due to better Anglo-French trade relations. The Dutch exportation of older books however remained steady and reached considerable heights around 1730. English sales to Holland started low but, despite considerable variation, were undoubtedly higher in the later period. Both in Holland and in England traditional learning and new ideas, as expressed in books, have always been honoured and if the eighteenth century covers a period of considerable change in the fortune of both countries it also shows them most contentedly and profitably engaged in business together.

 

G. Barber


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