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Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 26 (2019)

Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 26

(2019)– [tijdschrift] Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Andrew Pettegree
The Library of the Written Word and the evolving discipline of Book History

The Library of the Written Word (lww) began, at least for me, at a congenial dinner in Leiden, on 1 February 2007. I had agreed to meet up with Arjan van Dijk, my main contact at the publishing house Brill, to discuss future projects. Also present was Hendrik van Leusen who clearly had his own plans to share. Hendrik was hoping to develop a book history series, and wanted to persuade me to become its general editor. Although I was already the editor of one busy series, the St. Andrews Studies for Reformation History (then with Ashgate), I did not take much persuading. The new series corresponded with the trajectory of my own work, with a shift from Reformation to book history. I was also aware that book history was an expanding field, given new energy by the proliferation of digital resources, and taking imaginative new directions inspired by the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. There was clearly much that could be done with a dedicated series at Brill, especially given their towering position in early modern studies.1

By the end of that year the Library of the Written Word had published its first volume. Now, just more than a decade later, the series has seventy titles, with more than twenty other projects under contract. The series I curate, dealing with the hand press era between 1450 and 1820, is one of three separate strands, the others covering respectively the Manuscript Age (edited by Richard Gameson) and the Industrial World (Michael Winship).

For the rest of what follows I will use my experience of managing my section of the Library of the Written Word to reflect on the changing intellectual landscape of book history. From the beginning we cast our net wide, encompassing, as our remit allowed, the transition from manuscript to print in the fifteenth century, as well as the new developments in intellectual culture and collecting in the eighteenth century. I had the good fortune that, shortly after I committed to lww, I was invited to be the book discipline representative of the Renaissance Society of America. This was a conference I discovered relatively late in my career, since the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference had been a more regular haunt. Now as discipline representative, I was responsible for or-

ganising up to five sessions for each annual conference (which I was indulgently allowed to stretch to six), along with the occasional workshop panel. This assignment was especially valuable, as it brought me into regular contact with North American scholars active in the field, pursuing a wide range of approaches to the discipline. Several lww volumes originated from contacts made in these conferences.



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Figure 1. First volume of The library of the written world: Andrew Pettegree, The French book and the European book world, 2007


Book history is a house with many mansions. I was already acutely aware of the historical bifurcation between the approach of historians, focussing on industry practice, volume of sales, trends in publishing and societal impact, and the reconstructive work of material bibliography, much of it the painstaking work of librarians. The Universal Short Title Catalogue, which our book history group had been building in St Andrews, would help to draw these two strands of bibliographic investigation and interpretation together. It would also, by providing more comprehensive data, facilitate new work in the field.2 The work presented by English Literature specialists at the Renaissance Society of America sensitised me to a third powerful strand, focussed on text and paratexts, marginalia, manuscript transmission and collection building. Over the next six years, I hosted over one hundred fine papers at the rsa, and took part in panels on translation and the transmission of texts.

In due course I was delighted to hand over the torch as rsa discipline representative to Earle Havens, now also a supportive member of the lww editorial board, as is Helen Smith, representing on our board the English Literature strand of book history, and the

growing interest in gender roles within the book world. In the first years of the lww, I allowed the editorial board to grow slowly, somewhat to Brill's surprise. I have never been an exponent of advisory boards that play a largely decorative role. My hope was that those invited to join the lww editorial board would indeed be leading figures in the field, but also share the responsibility for bringing in high quality projects. One of the major challenges for early career researchers in establishing a publishing profile is when a proposal sits with a publisher for an extended period, sometimes more than a year, particularly if the proposal is not ultimately accepted. This delay can be very detrimental to a candidate's prospects on the job market.

The lww editorial board committed to an ambitious aspiration that an author submitting an outline proposal would have a response within one month; a full text would be read in three. Given that all the members of our editorial board are extremely busy people, I am extremely grateful that they have risen to this challenge. Falk Eisermann, one of our first board members, has been invaluable for his pivotal position within the community of incunabulists; at the other end of the chronological span, Ann Blair, Alicia Montoya and Mark Towsey cover the eighteenth century. Mark also, before he was a member of the editorial board, entrusted us with his prize-winning doctoral monograph, and another superb collective project on eighteenth-century libraries.3 Malcolm Walsby, Angela Nuovo and Helen Smith between them cover the sixteenth century, as well as France and Italy over the longer period, while Arthur der Weduwen and I look for promising new projects on the Low Countries. Angela Nuovo also generously offered us her milestone study of the Italian book trade, one of our best-selling volumes.4

It had become gradually more clear that we badly needed a second member of the editorial board in St Andrews simply to deal with the press of business. After Arthur der Weduwen had published his ground-breaking study of seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers he was clearly the ideal candidate to fulfil this role, and has functioned very effectively as secretary of the board since that date.5 I have reserved a special place here for our final board member, Ian Maclean, a scholar of such broad range and deep erudition that it is impossible to categorise. Ian will take on any proposal, however recondite, and provide prompt and clear-minded guidance. This is every series editor's dream.

It was always intended that this should be a mixed series. Historians are deeply committed to the idea that the monograph remains the lodestone of published research, and about half our volumes are full length, single-authored volumes of this sort. But book history is a discipline driven forward through an unusual variety of different types of publication, and this too is reflected in the series. We have published themed collections, conference volumes, editions and of course works of material bibliography. In scanning the field for potential projects, we had a powerful weapon in our armoury, in the annual book conference we host in St Andrews every summer. Now in its fourteenth year, we

have ranged over the field from the beginnings of print to the eighteenth century, with conferences devoted to themes, periods in the development of the European book trade, or regional markets. In the next three years, we will address the early Enlightenment, gender roles, and the often counter-intuitive relationship between manuscript and print.6 Since the first conference, close to 300 scholars, drawn from the international scholarly community, as well as libraries and the antiquarian book trade, have spoken in St Andrews. Many were presenting their work to an Anglophone audience for the first time. The conference always takes place at the end of June or early July, timed to coincide with our summer volunteering programme. This brings to St Andrews a group of six mostly young scholars from Europe or North America, where they share in the communal life of our project, receive some training in bibliographical technique, and attend our conference.7 Many have gone on to work in libraries or to PhD programmes in Europe or the United States.

All of the St Andrews conferences are published in the lww, sometimes with additional contributions from those unable to attend.8 We have also published the proceedings of conferences published elsewhere, many the culmination of major projects funded by European funding bodies. News Networks in Early Modern Europe is built around the papers delivered at the London conference concluding Joad Raymond's Leverhulme funded network grant, and Renaissance Cultural Crossroads emerged from a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.9 A Maturing Market started life as a conference to celebrate the fruits of Alexander Wilkinson's long partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon foundation of New York.10 Subversive Texts brought together groups of English and Polish scholars to discuss Catholic publishing in very different contexts; a fine collection assembled by Benito Rial Costas shone a welcome light on some little-known Spanish markets.11 Breaking new ground, like many of these projects, Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage had an enormous success with Printing Colour, our best-selling title.12 All told, when we factor in these collective volumes, close to four hundred different scholars have now had the opportunity to present their work in our series.

With the St Andrews contributions, we have taken the opportunity not only to showcase new research, especially by the international community of early career researchers, but also to point the way to new agendas. This is true especially of a triumvirate of titles,

Lost Books, Broadsheets and Book Trade Catalogues.13 These link back to work we have been undertaking for the Universal Short Title Catalogue, pressing forward on the new frontiers of bibliography. These volumes offer the first reports on our attempts, not only to document the surviving copies held by the world-wide library community, but to calculate the proportion of books published in the first age of print which no longer survive. This has involved a systematic survey for single-sheet printing, so often excluded from national bibliographical projects, and tracing lost books through the analysis of book trade archives, publishers' stock catalogues and auction catalogues. For auction catalogues, we benefited enormously from access to Brill's Book Sales Catalogues Online, which provides digital editions of over 1,000 catalogues of Dutch sales conducted before the year 1700.14 We augmented this stock with our own work in Copenhagen, Brussels, Ghent, New York, Berlin and Wolfenbüttel. In the autumn of 2018 we brought to a conclusion the first stage of this work, which had generated 480,000 individual pieces of data on books owned or offered for sale in the seventeenth century (many of the books, of course, date from earlier periods). We are currently engaged in the task of matching these records to our data on surviving editions; what remains after this matching process will very often be lost books. The result of this process promises to be revelatory. This work is proceeding in close collaboration with the Middlebrow Enlightenment project led by Alicia Montoya at Nijmegen and funded by the European Research Council, which will also result in the publication of several volumes in the Library of the Written World.15

For a flavour of the sort of insights available from attempts to recover editions no longer recorded in a surviving copy, one can do no better than turn to one of our recent monographs, Alexandra Hill's Lost Books and Printing in London.16 Here, the author compares information from the English Short Title Catalogue with books registered by the Stationers' Company, revealing several thousand titles no longer extant. Once these titles are added to the ustc, this will be the greatest accretion of new data on sixteenth-century English print for at least fifty years. The early provisional results from our matching of data from the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic seems to promise a result equally radical.17 We find not only unknown editions, but totally new texts, unknown publishers, and even new places of publication, locations where printing was not previous known to have taken place.18

Most of the lost editions, in London and the Dutch Republic, could be described as cheap print: ballads, pamphlets, psalm books, New Testaments and other small religious texts, almanacs and self-help manuals. This is an area of the book world in which the Library of the Written Word has been particularly active, reflecting both the insights of the ustc, and a new sensitivity in book historical scholarship to the type of books more likely to have been used to destruction than to grace the shelves of a library.19 Much of this fine work focusses on the Dutch Republic, an extraordinary laboratory for the hectic relationship of print, politics and public opinion.20 But this concentration on cheap print is in no way exclusive. One of our first volumes was Michiel van Groesen's study of the De Bry Voyages, one of the most monumental publications of the early modern period.21 We have studies on the trade in Spanish books in the Enlightenment, the transmission of the Classics, Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the publishing strategies of firms servicing more bourgeois tastes.22 We have a growing number of books studying libraries.23 We have work on translation and image culture.24 We have three books on the under-studied book culture of Scandinavia.25

For a series editor, there is nothing more satisfying than bringing to the market ground-breaking work by scholars making their way in the profession. Many of the volumes in the lww that fit this description are offered to us by scholars at European universities. It is a constant source of wonder to me that scholars from Scandinavia, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe can even contemplate the publication of a full-length work in English, all the more so as Brill, in common with an increasing number of academic publishers, do not offer more than rudimentary copy-editing. All told, not far short of half our authors come from outside the Anglophone scholarly world. In principle, we would also like to publish more translations of milestone books of book history not yet available in English. In practice, we find that the publishers of French or

German originals are over-ambitious in what they expect Brill to pay for translation rights. I would advise any scholar hoping to make an impact with their work in the Anglophone world to reserve the translation rights when they sign any contract.

In addition to monographs and edited collections, the series has three other active strands. Most established scholars have published articles dispersed around a large range of periodicals, conference volumes and themed collections. Many of these works will be available only in the largest research libraries. The opportunity to republish these essays as a volume in the Library of the Written Word is therefore a welcome service to the reading community. The lww has published volumes of the collected essays of Ian Maclean, Lotte Hellinga and Joop Koopmans, with several other such collections anticipated.26 To this list, we must add two volumes of the field-defining typographical researches of Hendrik Vervliet, and a majestic collection of the essays of Paul Valkema Blouw, who, working alone over the span of several decades, successfully identified the printers of more than two thirds of the works published anonymously in the Low Countries between 1540 and 1600. This was an astonishing achievement, and one we are delighted to celebrate through this magnificent volume.27

All series have their unusual features and one of ours is the publication of a number of works completed several decades ago. In the course of a research life, one reads some astonishing work in PhD dissertations, and sometimes I end up absolutely baffled why they were not subsequently published as books. The establishment of the Library of the Written Word gave me the opportunity to seek out the authors, and offer them the opportunity to publish in our series. One of the great advantages of fundamental archival research in book history and critical investigations in material bibliography, is that the study remains an indispensable point of departure for further work for many decades. Paul Arblaster's study of the Flemish news market and Stephen Rawles's bibliography of Denis Janot were our first classic revivals.28 They will soon be joined by Murray Simpson's study of Scottish book collecting on the eve of the Enlightenment, and Giles Bergel's study of the eighteenth-century English publisher, William Dicey.29

Rawles's work on Janot takes us to the last of our major categories of book: bibliographies. Alongside Rawles, we have published Valentina Sebastiani's study of the Basel publisher Johann Froben (the publisher of Erasmus), Paul Begheyn's bibliography of Jesuit books in the Dutch Republic, Arthur der Weduwen's encyclopaedic investigation of Dutch and Flemish newspapers, and two volumes on watermarks by Theo and Frans Laurentius.30 Soon we will publish Malcolm Walsby's milestone prosopography of

French provincial booksellers.31 These works offer an eloquent demonstration that even in this digital age there is still a place for print editions in the presentation of careful works of material bibliography, even when this involves the accumulation and display of large amounts of data.

To some extent, scholars get the best of both worlds, since for all books in the series the print version is accompanied by an edition available electronically. Brill has been an early adopter and creative exponent of the eBook, and these digital editions are proving increasingly popular both to libraries, confronting ever more intractable problems with space, and to students needing to have immediate access to the texts. Once libraries have subscribed to the eBook, any registered reader at that library can purchase a print download book-on-demand for €25, a fraction of the price of the original hard copy. Thanks to these digital editions, the lww has a far greater reach than would be suggested by hard copy sales. Several titles, with the help of support provided by funding bodies, have also been made available on open access.32 This increases readership more than tenfold.

It is now more than thirty years since I first heard predictions of the demise of academic publishing. Meanwhile the first generation of print surrogates have come and gone (remember the cd rom?) and there is still a place on our groaning shelves for beautifully crafted books. Judging by the prices charged for academic books, the bottom is hardly dropping out of the second-hand market either, although the switch to digital sales has certainly brought about closer alignment between second-hand dealers in terms of pricing: bargains are far harder to come by when the booksellers can look up the going rate on the internet.

There is a reason why the codex, the book, has proved such resilient technology. The importance of the relationship between hand, eye and brain in the process of gathering information from print has never been adequately researched, but there are some suggestions that it remains more efficient in terms of learning than screen reading. Indeed, two studies on information management are among the most original books in the lww series.33

The inherent strengths of the book, ease of searchability, committing facts to memory through a photographic recollection of location on the page, the ease of recovery of particular facts or phrases, the ability to mark-up books with notes, or consult several simultaneously: none of these has yet been fully replicated in any alternative technology. Certainly, for a series on book history, exploring the two millennia for which the codex has played a central role in the development of culture and society, the preservation of a hard cover version seems almost a theological obligation. When the Library of the Written Word passes its hundredth volume it will be a good moment to take stock

again of the state of scholarship in this area, and to celebrate the partnership of print and digital technologies. At the present rate of progress that date will not be far away.



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Figure 2. Some volumes of The library of the written world, 2007-2018



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