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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20 (2013)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 20

(2013)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Stijn van Rossem
Book history in Belgium
Who harbours the harbourless?

On 28 November 2003 the Flanders Book Historical Society organised a conference entitled ‘Boekgeschiedenis in Vlaanderen. Nieuwe instrumenten en benaderingen’ (‘Book History in Flanders. New instruments and approaches’). The initiative for this conference was the completion of the first phase of the Flemish Short-Title Catalogue (stcv), the first online retrospective bibliography of the hand press book in Flanders.1 Even people who could not attend can still get a sense of the optimism that surrounded that day in the acts of the colloquium.2 The back cover of the publication humbly states that even though book history in Belgium has not yet taken a big leap forward compared to its neighbouring countries, this publication proved that the ‘boekgeschiedenis nieuwe stijl’ (‘new-style book history’) had arrived in Flanders.

The first speaker was Pierre Delsaerdt, at the time head of the Historical collections of the University of Antwerp and president of the Flanders Book Historical Society. In his talk he gave an overview of book historical research in Flanders by using the ‘Kroniek van het gedrukte boek in de Nederlanden tot 2000’.3 The ‘Kroniek’ is a bibliography that was started in 1971 by Jeroom Machiels in Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België and that contains bibliographical references and a concise review of the most important book historical publications on Belgian topics.4 Using this unique tool, Delsaerdt painted a moderately positive image of book history in Flanders. Delsaerdt remarked that studies on book production in the fifteenth, sixteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries were quite well covered. However he found our knowledge of the other two angles of the book historical triangle, distribution and consumption, to be very limited. Furthermore, he stated that book history in Flanders needed to leave the safety of its own ideological living room and reach out to other disciplines. Too often, book historians wrote only in their own journals and the occasional festschrift, this way largely staying under the academic radar

and denying visibility to the field. Finally, book history needed to be implemented in an institution to ensure its future. Delsaerdt saw possibilities in a yet-to-be-erected Institute for book history (following the example of the Institut d'histoire du livre) or a collaboration with a research library (such as the Herzog August Bibliothek), and dreamt of the creation of a Flemish Heritage Library.

At the end of the colloquium, Paul Hoftijzer, professor of book history in Leiden, was asked to reflect on the theme of the conference and the presentations.5 Like Delsaerdt before him, he also pointed out the lack of an institutional anchor as a major sore point. He had positive things to say about the impressive libraries and archives and the potential they had for the field. A potential that was seldom used to its full extent, even in the case of the world-renowned Museum Plantin-Moretus, recognised as a unesco World Heritage site. He advised Flemish researchers to connect to the new international research topics, and in the organisation of international conferences he saw a great potential for Flemish book historians to break out of their shell.

In this essay, in many ways a follow-up to the colloquium of 2003, I will try to look at what happened in the next decade. Did the twenty-first century initiate a ‘new book history’ in Belgium? How did the field respond to the challenges researchers were facing, as mentioned by Delsaerdt and Hoftijzer? Finally, I will address the challenges Belgian book history is facing at the end of 2012.6



illustratie
Figure 1. P. Delsaerdt, K. de Vlieger-de Wilde (eds.), Boekgeschiedenis in Vlaanderen. Nieuwe instrumenten en benaderingen. Brussel 2004


Stcv

The aim of the stcv was to create an online retrospective bibliography of the printed book in Flanders until 1800. Because of the enormous scope of the project, a phased approach was necessary. Originally the Max Wildiersfonds and the Nederlandse Taalunie funded this project for four years (2000-2003).7 At the end of 2003, the database was up and running and contained 3,700 editions (based on 7,000 copies) of Dutch-language books printed in Flanders in the seventeenth century from six important collections.8 Since 2004, the funding for the stcv has come from the Flemish Government. In September 2009, more than 11,000 editions were to be found in the database, the language criterion was dropped, and for specific collections the temporal scope was widened to cover all printed books until 1800. Collections from other libraries were also included. After ten years of project funding, the stcv finally found a harbour. It was incorporated in the newly created Flemish Heritage Library, a network organisation established by six heritage libraries in Flanders at the end of 2008.9

The question remains whether this made the existence of the stcv less vulnerable. Indeed, the project is now part of a broader organisation and network, but the Flemish Heritage Library itself relies on funds from the government of Flanders that have to be renewed every five years. Furthermore, the stcv is but one of the tasks of the Flemish Heritage Library, meaning it has to compete with other projects within the organisation for the limited amount of money that can be spent.

At the end of 2012, the stcv contained 30,000 copies, the majority of which are to be found in ten collections. The stcv was in many ways the catalyst of the revitalisation of book historical research in Belgium. In its thirteen years of existence the project has gained an international reputation and its modus operandi has become the best practise in the bibliographical description of hand press books. The stcv manual Handleiding voor de Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen has been distributed and followed in Flanders and beyond.10 In 2010 and 2011, the bibliographers of the stcv also organised a workshop to teach librarians and scholars the tricks of the trade. Many of the bibliographers working on the project later took on important positions in the field of book history.

With its 30,000 checked copies, the stcv is an excellent research tool, not only to find specific editions, but also for statistical analysis. So far, only a limited number of researchers, almost all of them directly connected to the project, have used the database as an important source (Steven Van Impe and Jan Bos, Diederik Lanoye, Goran Proot and

myself).11 This is a pity because a more frequent use of this database in research projects could increase its visibility and stress its importance towards investors. Even though the stcv is now well-established, the database has always been running on a minimal budget. For the start-up period (2000-2003) two bibliographers were assigned to the project. After that the staffing was brought back to one full-time bibliographer. Recently, this has been further reduced to 0,70 fte, and due to the limited budget the Flemish Heritage Library has to work with in the next years, this all-time-low number of staff will most certainly be reduced even more. In comparison: at its peak (2003-2009) there were more than 20 bibliographers working for the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (stcn), and even today after the official closure of the stcn-project, two people for a total of 0,75 fte are still ‘maintaining’ the stcn. This means a finished bibliographical project in the Netherlands has more manpower than a running bibliographical project in Flanders. The stcv tries to circumvent this problem by training local librarians to become stcv bibliographers. This is necessary to maintain the scholary nature of bibliographical descriptions, based on the four-eyes principle. An advantage of this solution to the lack of staffing is that it increases awareness and bibliographical knowledge in local collections and standardises the descriptive model in Flanders. On the other hand, because a newly trained bibliographer can never reach the same level as an experienced one, it raises questions about the quality of the descriptions and overall makes the progress of the national bibliography for Flanders very slow.

Publishing History

One of the fields where book history has made progress in the last few years is publishing history. Current studies build on the groundbreaking works of two founding fathers: Leon Voet and Ludo Simons. For the ancien régime The Golden Compasses, written by Leon Voet, former director of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, gives a detailed overview of the activities and strategies of the Officina Plantiniana.12 More than forty years after its publication The Golden Compasses is still a quintessential reference for editorial practices in the ancien régime, not only for the Southern Netherlands, but for the whole of Europe. As one of the few Belgian monographs to be written in English, on the

most important publishing firm of the period and based on the most complete business archive of the whole ancien regime period, it is still the best known and most cited ‘Belgian’ book-historical study.13

Contemporary research uses the work of Voet as a stepping stone and a mirror. On the one hand, it focuses on aspects of the history of the Officina Plantiniana not covered by Voet, such as the successors of Plantin, the Moretus family. Dirk Imhof has written on the Moretuses in the seventeenth century, e.g. in his dissertation on the publication strategies of Joannes I Moretus, Plantin's successor.14 Together with Karen Bowen, he has studied the strategic use of intaglio printing to illustrate Plantin press books.15

Recently, scholars have emphasised the need to step away from the paradigm of Plantin and his successors. Even though the abundance of sources makes it impossible not to work on the Officina Plantiana, the need is felt to look at other printers and booksellers in order to discover general publishing practices. The large scale and specific output prohibit this firm from serving as a pars pro toto of the book trade in Antwerp, the Southern Netherlands or Europe. Based on the partially preserved business archives of the Verdussen family, the second most important Antwerp dynasty, I have analysed their editorial strategies. My research focuses on differences with the Officina Plantiniana, regarding for instance collaboration practices between publishers and the economic importance of popular prints in the publisher's list.16

Even though we still have many lacunae to fill concerning the Antwerp book trade, notably in the eighteenth century, the city has received a lot more attention than other typographic centres in the Southern Netherlands. The increased attention devoted to other cities is therefore a useful development. After defending his thesis on the book trade in the (post-)incunabula period Renaud Adam has started a project on the book trade in Brussels in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.17 In 2009 a reference work was published on the book in the principauté de Liège by the Société des bibliophiles Liégeois with contributions from 37 authors.18 A 2010 exhibition project resulted in a fresh overview on the history of the book in Mechelen (Malines).19

The history of publishing houses in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is almost entirely monopolised by literary historians, contrary to the ancien régime period where publishing history is mostly carried out by historians. With his Geschiedenis

van de uitgeverij in Vlaanderen Ludo Simons wrote a groundbreaking study uncovering the history of the publishing industry in Flanders, a history that is strongly linked to the emerging cultural identity of Flanders (Vlaamse Beweging/the Flemish movement), to the ideological pillars such as catholicism and socialism, dividing social and cultural life in Flanders until the end of the twentieth century and last but not least the ambiguous relationship with the Netherlands.20 In 2013, a revised edition of this magnum opus will appear, incorporating the latest studies. Furthermore, the focus will shift from the publishing houses to the role of the book in Flanders, thereby producing an alternative cultural history of Flanders.

A new generation of literary historians such as Kevin Absillis and Jan Pauwels will certainly be included in this new edition. Pauwels has written on the post-mortem editions of the work of Hendrik Conscience, Flanders' best-known author of the nineteenth century, by the Amsterdam publisher Lambertus Jacobus Veen, emphasising the important role of the publisher in the creation of Conscience as a canonized author.21 Kevin Absillis wrote his doctoral dissertation on the publishing house of Angèle Manteau, using the history of this unique firm almost as a metaphor for the introduction of modernism in Flanders.22

Poorly studied periods have recently been researched, such as the period of the Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1815-1830), when both the Northern and Southern Netherlands were reunited under king Willem I.23 In her dissertation on the political role of literature during this period, Janneke Weijermars also focused on the different publishing houses involved. In francophone Belgium Michel-Benoît Fincoeur carried out research into francophone publishing during the Second World War that resulted in a PhD in 2006.24

Literary Studies

The possibilities of book historical methodologies in literary studies have been clearly demonstrated since the 1970s and 1980s by the works of Werner Waterschoot, Piet Verkruijsse and Hubert Meeus, all of whom stressed the importance of materiality in the study of literary texts.25 Fairly few scholars have picked up on this to incorporate analytical bibliography into their methodology. An exception is the dissertation of

Maartje De Wilde on vernacular secular song books in the seventeenth century.26 This work draws heavily on the material description of the printed sources and focuses less on a purely literary analysis of the text, in order to answer important book-historical questions about the materiality, distribution and reception of these books.



illustratie
Figure 2. K. Absillis, Vechten tegen de bierkaai. Over het uitgeverskuis van Angèle Manteau (1932-1970). Amsterdam/Antwerpen 2009


Goran Proot left the official literary canon as well to work on theatre programmes for plays organised by the Jesuits in the provincia Flandro-Belgica.27 Analytical bibliography is an important part of this methodology as he meticulously describes formats, sizes, and typography, as well as the print runs and printing costs of the theatre programs. A fundamental result of this research is the development of a mathematical model which makes it possible to estimate loss rates in large corpora of editions.28

Consumption

The reception or consumption of books has been only sparsely studied in a Belgian context. Book historians have focused mainly on libraries and the collection habits of scholars and the upper social classes. Pierre Delsaerdt's dissertation (published in 2001) combined research of the Leuven book trade with an analysis of the book collections of the professors at the University of Leuven.29 Bart op de Beeck worked on the liquidation of the Jesuit libraries in the Low Countries.30 Lastly, Chris Coppens has been researching sixteenth-century sales catalogues in a European perspective.31 South of the language border, Céline van Hoorebeeck focuses on the history of libraries in the late Middle Ages and Claude Sorgeloos has written numerous articles and books on private and library collections in the early modern period.32 So far, the newest research questions, focusing on individual reading habits33 and based on ego-documents, often collected in large databases such as the Reading Experience Database, have not really materialised in Belgium.34

Books and globalisation

Since 2008, professor Werner Thomas of the University of Leuven has started a series of research projects on the role of the printing press in the Southern Netherlands in the creation of the Spanish colonial empire. Under the title ‘The infrastructure of globalisation’, several scholars are working on different regions of the Spanish Empire: New Spain, New Granada and Rio de la Plata, and Peru.35 All projects build on Serge Gruzinsky's thesis of the role of the printing press in mondialisation or the creation of one big intellectual space, and in the creation of a ‘paper infrastructure’ at the service of the Spanish monarchy.36 The uniqueness of this new research topic lies in the fact that

it combines book-historical methodologies on authorship and translation, commercial networks and distribution, and reception with the more general history of mentalities. It sheds light on the international position of the Southern Netherlands after the separation from the Northern Netherlands, and successfully categorises the Southern Netherlands as a cultural hub within the Spanish Empire.

Typography

For decades, typographic research in Belgium has been the area of Hendrik D.L. Vervliet, one of the most renowned scholars in this field worldwide.37 Even well after his retirement, he continues to publish in large numbers, although the focus of his latest research lies primarily on non-Belgian topics, such as French Renaissance printing types.38

From 2009 to 2012, the post-doctoral research project of Goran Proot aimed to shed light on the typographical evolutions of the hand press book in Flanders. In order to attain this end, he analysed the typography of a limited number of well-chosen genres. The leading hypothesis of this project is that typographical evolutions develop differently, faster or slower, depending on the characteristics of the distinguished genres.39 The work of Alexandre Vanautgaerden also deserves attention. In 2008 he co-edited La page de titre à la Renaissance with Jean-François Gilmont, containing thirteen studies on title page design.40 In 2012 he published his dissertation on the active role of Desiderius Erasmus in the design and publication of his works.41

Societies and journals

Belgium has two book historical societies and four bibliophile societies. The book historical societies are divided by the language border: there is the Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis (Flanders Book Historical Society) and the francophone Groupe de contact: Documents rares et précieux. The bibliophile societies are connected to cities: Mons (Société des Bibliophiles de Mons/Société des Bibliophiles Belges séant à Mons), Antwerp (Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen), Brussels (Koninklijke Vereniging van Bibliofielen en Iconofielen van België) and Liège (Société des Bibliophiles liégeois). I will briefly go into the most important evolutions.

The Flanders Book Historical Society (vwb) was founded in 1996 and has increased its activities and membership over the years. The board grew from two to seven members and the membership went from 40 in 1996 to 62 in 2012. Originally, the members of the Flanders Book Historical Society met once or twice a year. In 2003, the Society started to organise conferences and colloquia for non-members as well. Over the last decade, a book historical colloquium has been organised almost every year, often in collaboration with other organisations such as the Groupe de contact or the Nederlandse Boekhistorische Vereniging.42 Furthermore the vwb started a new initiative in 2009, the Miraeus lectures. This series, organised in collaboration with the City of Antwerp and the Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen, aimed at promoting scholary exchange between Flanders and the rest of the world. This proved to be a successful formula: as of the end of 2012, seventeen prominent speakers have spoken in the Nottebohmzaal and the Miraeus Lectures are a well-established name. The international position of book history in Flanders will reach a peak in 2014, when the vwb will host the Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (sharp) in Antwerp on the theme ‘Religions of the book’.

The two main book historical journals in Belgium are issued by bibliophile societies: Le livre et l'éstampe by the Koninklijke Vereniging van Bibliofielen en Iconofielen van België and De Gulden Passer by the Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen. The latter journal in particular underwent a facelift in recent years. Originally established as the yearbook of the Vereniging van Antwerpse Bibliofielen in 1923, it widened its scope in 2009. First, it changed its format from a yearbook to a scientific journal by introducing peer review and by appearing twice a year, and second, it changed its subtitle to Journal for Book History, this way officially serving as a journal for a scholary field, rather than being the medium of a society. Led by a rejuvenated board, De Gulden Passer has attracted a lot of new scholars from Belgium and abroad.

Rewind to 2003: Results and challenges

Looking back at 2003, how many of the challenges described by Delsaerdt and Hoftijzer have been addressed, or better, how far have the goals of these two professors of book history been realised ten years later? On the positive side, the international orientation of book history in Belgium has increased dramatically. New research topics, such as the economics of publishing, the form-content relationship, and a transnational approach, are now aligned with current international scholarship. On an institutional level, book

history in Belgium has widened its scope with internationally-oriented journals, lecture programmes and conferences.

Nevertheless, there are still a number of challenges to be faced. In academic research, Belgium is still running behind on recent developments in the study of reading practices. The progress of successful projects such as the Short-Title Catalogue Flanders has slowed down as funds are diminishing long before the finish line is even in sight. New media, such as the internet, audiobooks and the e-book, are not studied in Belgium from a book-historical angle. Generally speaking, the field needs an allembracing research program aimed at locating and consequently filling in the scholary blind spots. Institutionally, book historical and bibliophile societies in Belgium and the Netherlands have started work together occasionally, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. It might also be necessary to critically analyse the landscape of the different organisations and journals in order to avoid overlap. We should not be afraid to integrate existing societies if this creates interesting synergies. Furthermore, a clear demarcation of the scope and position of the different book historical journals in Belgium and the Netherlands is necessary to prevent an overkill of similar journals that will eventually lead to a lack of quality.

Apart from these minor remarks, there is one big gaping hole in the expressway. Book history in Belgium is still an academic vagrant. Until now, most academic work has not been realised in universities, but in libraries. Librarians such as D.H.L. Vervliet, Pierre Delsaerdt, Leon Voet, Elly Cockx-Indestege, Chris Coppens and Ludo Simons are highly respected and are considered among the most important researchers in the field in- and outside Belgium. But by working as librarians, they have not had to incorporate their work in university programs, motivate their research in front of scholary committees or publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. Book history has been able to flourish in its own small garden, but this independent status has also made it vulnerable and dependent on the few and shrinking number of part-time researchers, especially since the profile of the librarian-scholar seems to disappear from the library staffs to be replaced by the librarian-manager.

In 2003, Delsaerdt and Hoftijzer stressed the institutional embedding of the field in a university program or research library as the most important challenge. Ten years later some things have changed, but not for the better. Indeed, a Flemish Heritage Library has arrived, but it is strictly organised as a network between libraries with collections of rare books and operates in no way as a scholary benefactor (e.g. by offering research travel grants or scholarships). Furthermore, no Belgian university offers a book history programme. Needless to say, Antwerp would be the perfect spot for such a programme. Many of the scholars in the history and literature departments work in the field, the city houses unique collections and archives (Museum Plantin-Moretus to name but one), and many editorial houses are located there. If we fail to give book history an academic institutional harbour, a lot of what has been built over the last years may collapse; the rich tradition of more than 50 years is threatened because it solely depends on the activities of individuals, however talented and motivated they might be.


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