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David McKitterick
Bibliopolis
http://www.bibliopolis.nl
If the current and growing interest in the history of the book is a result partly of the electronic revolution, with its loose talk of ‘the death of the book’, then there is a peculiar appropriateness that those very electronic resources should be harnessed to present the subject. Bibliopolis is important not just because it is the first of its kind on a national scale, the first to choose a computer environment rather than printed hard copy for a national history of the book. It is also important because it represents new kinds of collaboration, between dozens of scholars and, at an institutional level, between the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the university libraries at Amsterdam, Leiden, Nijmegen and Utrecht, and the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging.
Although based in the KB, it is the result of teamwork, drawing on collaborators across the country and from overseas. It has been made possible thanks to funding by the NWO, and the site has been designed by the firm of Zeezeilen. In these simple statements there lurk not just the customary grateful acknowledgements to all those involved, but also a reminder that such projects depend on commitment from many different kinds of people. Websites differ from books in more than their appearance. Furthermore, the fact that this first phase of the project has been completed in the astonishingly short time of four years (it began in 1998) is both a tribute to those involved and a reflection of the stern realities of public funding.
In its most basic form, beginning with the Handboek (note the adaptation of vocabulary from a physical to a virtual, electronic, environment), the website is invitingly simple: five periods. These periods are divided 1460-1585, 1585-1725, 1725-1830, 1830-1910, 1910-present. Following brief introductions, each period is in turn addressed under a group of heads: the book as physical object, its production, its distribution, and its use. Obviously, beyond this level, it is impossible to maintain complete consistency of approach. Guilds, for example, are of much less importance in the twentieth century than they were in the sixteenth, when they controlled much of the trade; censorship, despite its catch-all terminology, represents very different issues in different centuries and under different régimes; and public libraries have much more influence at some times than at others. One important feature of the Handboek is that each essay is intended to be read either within its period, or them- | |
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atically, across periods, so that it is always possible to obtain a continuous narrative. Equally importantly, terms and names that are explained elsewhere in Bibliopolis are underlined, so that reference can be made if further detail is desired.
This further detail is organised into a series of files, with links to them all clearly presented on the first screen: a picture bank, a biographical dictionary, and a dictionary of terms. Alongside these are access to guides to secondary literature, to retrospective bibliographies, library catalogues, special collections and sales catalogues. The layout is sparse, and clear. Perhaps not surprisingly, since it has involved a very
Homepage of www.bibliopolis.nl.
great deal of work, both the strengths and the drawbacks of some of the content emerge in the picture bank, the biographical dictionary and the dictionary of terms.
The picture bank, even with some rather quirky indexing, includes many rarities, and it will surely transform the ways in which the historical environments of the manufacture and use of books can be taught. One early and very pleasant surprise, for example, was to discover a full-colour reproduction of the painting of the Van de Venne printing shop at Middelburg in 1623, now in a private London collection. In this section, as in others, there are links to other sites, including the collection of prints at Amsterdam University Library, the huge collection of photographs at Den Haag, and the Atlas Beudeker.
The section on Personen is similarly linked up to other useful sites, including the Internationaler Biographischer Index published by Saur. It depends, centrally, on six files, some published, some not. But it must be remembered that any biographical index, let alone prosopographical study, depends ultimately on much more than what has been published; and here there is a great deal more to be done. So far, accordingly, it is much better on booksellers and printers than, for example, typefounders or engravers, let alone the journeymen of the book trade. Even a major figure like Romein de Hooghe is reduced to ‘werkzaam: Amsterdam 1674-1675’ - the detail from the Thesaurus, 1473-1800, perfectly justifiable in the context of the Thesaurus but a poor introduction here for a layman to the links to a large literature.
On the other hand, the definitions in the glossary section can be too brief to be especially helpful. A pair of examples must serve. Thus, fotografisch zetten (and its synonym fotozetten) is described simple as ‘zetten met behulp van een fotozetmachine’. Something concerning its dates, its development, its mechanism, and its use would all have been helpful. The term cd-roms (cd-rom will not produce the page) is defined as ‘computer optical disc, uitsluitend gebruikt voor het lezen, niet schrijven, van gege- | |
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vens (compact disc read only memory)’. Again, it is not enough: nothing on its history, and insufficient on its applications and on its range of uses. For some people the comparisons, both in the glossary and in the historical entries, will prove to be with other dictionaries of the history of the book. The Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, edited by Severin Corsten and others, has been appearing from Hiersemann since 1985, and has reached the letter S. In Paris, the first volume, A-D, has just appeared of the Dictionnaire encyclopédique du livre, edited by Pascal Fouché and others and published by Electre. Bibliopolis is briefer than both in the way it treats entries (cd-rom gets about eight hundred words in the Dictionnaire), though it tends to be more generous in its references. Like the Dictionnaire, it is of course illustrated where appropriate or feasible.
Under the section Boeken in the main headings at the opening of Bibliopolis are presented an array of links to databases and library catalogues. Those that are password-protected include some of the most relevant of all: stcn, the Nederlandse Bibliografie, Brinkman's Cumulatieve Catalogus, Picarta and istc. (It is high time that stcn, which is publicly funded, was made more readily available than this, for people who wish to use it only occasionally.) Library sites and catalogues (also, be it remembered, publicly funded) are more generously available: the KB, Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden, Nijmegen, Utrecht, Deventer, Haarlem, Rotterdam and Middelburg, besides the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Brussels, the Herzog August Bibliothek, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Library and the Bodleian Library. There are links also to the sites of some other institutions, including the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum and the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica. All this is admirably clear, and easier to use than the next main section, Collecties, which works best if you know what collection you are seeking: it is much less useful for browsing.
Bibliopolis is a magnificent and promising tool for research, as well as for teaching and for a wider public. Its success will depend not just on its use, but also on how far there are resources to maintain it, and to improve it still further. It includes in a prominent position details of how it may be contacted, for correction or further suggestions. The electronic ability to update, to amend and to extend is one of its greatest potential distinctions. Every user, present or potential, must hope for the KB's continuing commitment, and to a continuing spirit of inter-institutional collaboration that offers such strength. Its contributors, its editors, and those who have designed it, besides the many people whose names do not appear all deserve the warmest congratulations for what has been so far achieved. Let us now turn to some more general issues.
By its own definition, Bibliopolis is ‘de elektronische nationale geschiedenis van het gedrukte boek in Nederland’: ‘the electronic national history of the printed book in the Netherlands’. It is important to bear this ambition in mind. The claim is a bold one, for it is a reminder that, for the foreseeable future, this is how the world will see the subject. Parts of the site are already available in English, and more will gradually become so. Meanwhile in the various national histories of the book that are currently in course of publication, it marks one very obvious departure, and several that are
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less obvious. The first, of course, is that it is electronic: a website rather than a series of volumes. We have recently seen printed volumes on the history of the book in Britain (vol. 3, 1400-1557; vol. 4, 1557-1695), in the United States (the colonial book, to 1790), in Australia (1891-1945) and in Germany (1870-1918). Projects are also afoot in Scotland, Ireland, Canada and India - all, likewise, to be published conventionally. The reasons for the decision to proceed differently in the Netherlands are several; but they include a pragmatic mixture, personal and scholarly, of what is feasible, and a strong faith that this is a subject that will, in fact, respond best to such a mode of proceeding. In a further bid to reach as wide an audience as possible, a separate printed volume Bibliopolis, developed from what might be termed the central parts of the website, both text and illustration, is to be published by Waanders in 2003.
When, in 1994, a group of interested people met in Baarn to discuss a possible history, some of the challenges to such a project - however it might be published, in hard copy or electronically - quickly became clear. First, perhaps, was the issue of boundaries. Quite apart from the political events of the early 1830s, and the establishment of modern Belgium, the history of the development of the Amsterdam book trade can only be understood by reference to the history of Antwerp, the political and military events of the late sixteenth century, and the silting-up of the Scheldt. Where, in other words, does the ‘Dutch’ history of the book start?
For some parts of the history of the book in the Netherlands and in Flanders we are exceptionally well served by the existing literature. A strong tradition of retrospective bibliography has provided much of the basis for any study of earlier centuries, from Campbell, Holtrop and their successors working on fifteenth-century books, through Nijhoff and Kronenberg on books printed between 1501 and 1540, to Anna Simoni on books from the Low Countries dating between 1601 and 1621 in the British Library, to the volumes of Belgica typographica, 1541-1600. Since 1998, we have also been able to profit from Paul Valkema Blouw's remarkable Typographia Batava, 1541-1600, while the stcn has been growing steadily at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. All these are quite apart from more specialist studies; and if the record is less full for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the existence of Brinkman's trade bibliography since the 1880s offers at least a grounding for more recent times.
There are, of course, gaps. So too there are major gaps in the extent to which archives - state, municipal, religious, commercial, institutional, professional - have been explored. The existence of the library of the Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels, including its archival collections, is a unique strength for any historian of the book in this region since the seventeenth century, the more important in that trade collections in Germany and Britain were destroyed in the Second World War. The remarkable work of Isabella van Eeghen on Amsterdam has been of immense benefit to our understanding of the European, not just the local, trade. But on the other hand a very great deal remains to be done even in such obvious major archives as those of the Plantijn-Moretus Museum or of the typefounders and printers Enschedé, notwithstanding the outstanding example set by Leon
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Voet and Charles Enschedé, to name just one from each. We know a lot about Dutch paper-making, but disappointingly little about the international Dutch paper trade. Our knowledge of private book ownership is patchy, as we have recently been reminded by the valuable example set in the work of José de Kruif on Den Haag in the eighteenth century. Much, meanwhile, depends on auction catalogues, on the work of the late Bert van Selm and on that of Otto Lankhorst and his collaborators. In this last case, we now have much of the evidence readily available in microform, but the task of analysis that faces us is mountainous.
To turn from manuscript and printed archives, and to view the question from the perspectives of different subjects or different parts of the population, is to find more gaps at every turn. Thanks especially to the work of Jan Storm van Leeuwen we know a considerable amount about decorative binding in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But (and the Netherlands is not unique in this) we know much less about more ordinary bindings. The literature on nineteenth-century binding is growing gradually. Thanks to a mixture of company histories, memoirs and scholarly articles we know about several of the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishers; but their international activities remain generally under-explored by serious historians. A great deal remains to be done on the part played by the Dutch book trades in the wars that have swept across Europe, from the Thirty Years War to the Second World War. For the prosopography of the trade, we have excellent dictionaries, based on a wealth of documentary evidence by, for example, J.G.C. Briels for the United Netherlands in the period 1570-1630 and by Anne Rouzet for the sixteenth and seventeenth century book trade in the area now covered by Belgium. Rotterdam bibliopolis, edited by H. Bots and others (1997), offers another approach. Among older authorities, there are Burger and Moes on Amsterdam, and Kossmann on Den Haag. For maps, and for much of the print trade, there is a more than respectable literature; for the use, as distinct from the production, of engravings or lithographs in book illustration, the literature is much less full. For children's books, and for some kinds of schoolbooks, there is a growing literature, and the recent exhibition at Rotterdam of children's literature, Wonderland, was one manifestation of how historical and current themes can be brought together for better public understanding. Whatever the subject, where organised publication in depth is
impractical, exhibition catalogues can provide a wealth of miscellaneous information. Nijmegen offers one example in the two exhibitions Gheprint te Nymeghen (1990) by Paul Begheyn and Els Peters, and Gebonden in Nijmegen (1996) by Gerrie van Dongen. The thematic exhibition on early almanacs Een handdruk van de tijd (1997) by Jeroen Salman offers another.
It is easy enough to spot the omissions among what already exists; and the recent attention that has been paid by some scholars to the complexities of the twentieth century is very much to be welcomed. Thanks to Paul Hoftijzer and Otto Lankhorst's invaluable handbook Drukkers, boekverkopers en lezers in Nederland tijdens de Republiek (1995, second edition 2000) it is also easy to see how much has, in fact, been accomplished for earlier periods: the need for a second, much expanded, edition
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only five years after the first, was some measure of how much is being done. The website Book history online, essential to any book historian, and linked to Bibliopolis, tells a very similar story. The fact that the secondary literature is so much richer today is thanks not least to the founding of Quaerendo in 1971. From the beginning, it has provided an international forum of unique value. The present Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis (1994-) has provided welcome and valuable further space, often from different viewpoints and with different emphases in interest.
So, while it is no doubt true that any attempt at a full-scale coherent history of the book in the Netherlands would labour under great difficulties of incomplete and even uninitiated research, it is also true that the field is a lively one. There will be no agreeing when such a pitch of knowledge might have been reached that a multi-volume history might be attempted. No doubt it was anxieties of this kind, among other issues, that prompted the refusal to fund such a history a few years ago. To write history always requires a certain risk, as well as attention to the sources. No history, whether of the book or of any other subject, can be definitive; nor can it be complete. It can only suggest how a subject might be viewed, and researched further, in the future. The question of whether or not we know enough to write a responsible history of a subject is not just one of completeness. Nor, even, is it only one of available skills and personnel, though this has a strong practical bearing. In other words, disagreements over exactly (or even approximately) how much one needs to know, before one can dare to write, are peripheral to the real central questions: of approach, of explicit and frank admission of omissions (so far as these can, indeed, be known), of a sense of tentative reaching towards understanding, an acknowledgement that all historical enterprises proceed step by hesitant step.
Questions of definition are obvious enough. The complicated history of the Low Countries, linguistically as well as territorially, means that there are more than an ordinary number of issues to be addressed. In the volumes so far published on their own nations, both the Australian and the American histories of the book have fallen into the trap of assuming a position where one language (English) is so dominant that others have been neglected or forgotten. The decision to omit early Spanish-language books in the area of what is now the United States was a deliberate one, and the opposite of what Isaiah Thomas did when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he wrote on the history of printing in America. In Australia, likewise, the linguistic richness of immigrants, as well as the many Aborigine languages, make scarcely any appearance in the history of the book for the period 1891 to 1945. In the Netherlands, Spanish, French and English, quite apart from Dutch in all its variety, have their own parts to play, with different emphases at different periods.
In saying that, we remind ourselves that linguistic and national boundaries are not the same. The southern boundary of 1831 places Antwerp, and Flanders more generally, in a position that has to be defined differently according to period. Whatever the commercial, political and social pressures, it is not sufficient to confine a national history of the book to present national boundaries. Here, Bibliopolis seems inconsistent, for example including references to the publishers Brepols (founded before
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modern Belgium) but apparently omitting reference to the two major studies Brepols, drukkers en uitgevers, 1796-1996 by Roland Baetens and others, and Kinderprenten van Brepols (1996) by Patricia Vansummeren. The idea of the nation-state may be (mostly) a nineteenth-century one, but that does not give an excuse to rewrite the boundaries of history.
For more prolonged definition and reflection, there is nothing to beat conventional print. It is, of course, possible to compile a version of history as a structured website, but this is no equal to the building up of an argument, its exposition, and its conclusion. As Han Brouwer, echoing others, emphasised in the very first essay in the first volume of the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis, the history of the book depends on its integration in social, political, economic and religious contexts. It is also a part of the history of learning and discovery (geographical, literary or scientific) as well as of communication. It further depends on international perspectives, and in this regard not only those of trade. The many brief essays in Bibliopolis on periods, on broader or smaller topics, are often excellent, and ingenious in the amount of cross-referencing that they have managed to include. Some users will miss the footnotes to underpin allegations or claims. But the greatest difficulties lie in their tendency to hermeticism, and, more seriously, in the fact that the dictatorship of computer software, as used here, shapes the content. Education by soundbite, effective enough at one level, is not necessarily the way to better understanding.
The underlying question is a larger one; and, given the project's own history, in a world of incomplete knowledge, it is in many ways an unfair one. But, nonetheless, it persists. Bibliopolis is not a history of the book, in the sense that it presents a coherent and argued account of its subject. Given that it is composed of many fragments, the longest no more than two or three screens, it is piecemeal. It is also an anthology, valuable in its own way but different. The intellectual links (as distinct from those offered by the computer, on screen) have often to be assumed. As an encyclopaedia, it works, often excellently. As a sustained argument, its directions and interpretations are difficult to discover.
This is not necessarily any criticism of what is included. The question arises because the history of the book has always to be founded not just in the writing, manufacture and use of books and other printed or manuscript matter, but also in a spectrum of more widely cultural events, and in a more general world of industrial, commercial and economic pursuits and interests. How influential is printing? How has printing influenced the book? What do we assume and understand by printing? Questions of causation are inevitable. The commonplace that books are for use has inescapable and important implications for the ways by which the history of the book demands to be studied.
Lest this seem - by implication, if not explicitly - too harsh a judgment, let us return to Bibliopolis's own claim, to be ‘the electronic national history of the printed book in the Netherlands’. If we leave aside the definite article de, rather than a more tentative een that might have been used at this point, we are left with a difficulty. Let us also leave aside one other obvious question that gets relatively little attention, of
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how manuscript and print existed and worked side by side: that the year 1460 does not mark a divide, but a change of direction, and that in order to understand either medium after that date it is necessary to refer to the other.
If we stand back a little further, we may perceive another question. Is, perhaps, one root of the problem in the fact that Bibliopolis is aimed at too many audiences? Some of these audiences are, indeed, simply in search of summaries. Some will want pictures. Some will want to use the biographical databases, and others will want definitions. Everyone will want his or her own level of detail, and therefore many will turn away, just as many others will be satisfied. Others again will use it as a convenient route to further sites. But there cannot be one electronic history, on the principle that one size fits all. It does not. For all its many strengths, Bibliopolis is a reminder that we have barely begun to understand how to publish complex issues on the Web. The principle of universal access, on which so much public funding insists, imposes assumptions that may, in fact, help very few in more than the most passing way.
The problem is by no means unique to the KB. As an experiment, the first of the kind in its field, Bibliopolis has achieved a remarkable degree of success. The same kind of problem faces other national libraries as well, who are expected to deliver to a putative national (or international) readership information that poses as knowledge. In this, the pressures of public funding place our national libraries in a hapless position. University libraries, school libraries, or specialist libraries all know their readers or audiences, and have some idea of how to present their strengths. National libraries are expected to use electronic resources to reach audiences that are, in fact, all too often ill-defined.
When there are opportunities for links to other databases, as an electronic resource Bibliopolis is incomparably better than conventional national histories of the book. The collections of portraits at Amsterdam, for example, add immediately to the depth of coverage. The link to Book history online makes economical and advantageous use of a now well-established website. Other links will suggest themselves to each person individually: printers' devices, maps, prints, author sites and other retrospective bibliographies (the English STC has much on Dutch books and booksellers, for example) must all be candidates for the future. It is much to be hoped that more will be offered on prints, drawings and book illustration, where, for example, links to the Fondation Custodia in Paris, or to the Leiden website www.delineavit.nl might be incorporated. The world of cartography also deserves to be further explored, and exploited.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek has been home to the development of Bibliopolis, and it must be expected that it will remain so, either alone or in partnership with others. In such a context, it is reasonable to ask how Bibliopolis can help the KB's own electronic future. How, as the library's site grows to take account of the history and development of Dutch literature, language and culture, as texts and images are increasingly mounted of both old and modern books, and as electronic delivery becomes an everyday complement to print, can Bibliopolis contribute? In many ways, the last few years have been years not just of development, but also of experiment of yet
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another kind: of beginning to determine electronically expressed parameters of an important part of national culture, and of showing how files can be made to sit alongside each other, cross-referring and cross-linking. The History of the Book is near the head of the agenda, and the agenda has many larger items yet to come. Bibliopolis is inevitably driven not just by book historians, but also by other national responsibilities. Like the international interests of so many of the people and companies with which it is concerned, it is in the midst of a spider's web of trades, uses and meanings, with the potential to show how and where the Netherlands sits in the world. Whether or not anyone has the boldness to tackle on paper a history of the book in the Netherlands, Bibliopolis is here to stay, very much to be welcomed and, one hopes, to grow.
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