One of my goals for the 2024 AHA Reads challenge was to read and blog about a co-authored history book. My choice was The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age, a history of the book trade in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. As the publisher's page describes it:
The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic. Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch world of the seventeenth century: books.
In this fascinating account, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how the Dutch produced many more books than pictures and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe. Key innovations in marketing, book auctions, and newspaper advertising brought stability to a market where elsewhere publishers faced bankruptcy, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged. This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the Dutch conquest of the European book world and shows the true extent to which these pious, prosperous, quarrelsome, and generous people were shaped by what they read.
In the first quarter of Utrecht's academic calendar, I co-taught my first book history course, which covered the development of the codex to the rise of print, and included several classes focused on digital techniques for studying book history. Reading this book was excellent preparation!
Not to say that it was easy, or light reading. Like many books published by Yale University Press, The Bookshop of the World is written by specialists, for specialists, while also being marketed to an interested general audience. Counting myself very much among those lay readers (to the best of memory, this was the first book on Dutch history I have ever read), I was fascinated by what I learned about the historical context in which the rise of the Dutch book trade took place. For instance, did you know that during a period of 132 years (1568 to 1700), the Dutch republic was at peace for only sixteen of them? (p. 5) The "rise of print," like many major historical developments, tends to get presented as an inevitability, but, as the authors point out, it wasn't: Europeans, from 1452 onward, had moveable type, but the printed book was not an instant success. As the authors put it (and I took care to emphasize to my students) "Print lacked a sustainable business model. Unsold copies piled
up, and many of the first generation of printers, like Gutenberg, went
bankrupt." (p. 28).
As someone working in a Dutch university, I also delighted at learning about the history of higher education in the Netherlands, as witnessed through their interactions with the book trade (printing copies of university dissertations was big business for Dutch printers). In the early modern period, the university at Leiden stood preeminent among Dutch universities; Utrecht, founded in 1634, became the second-most prestigious. The
university at Harderwijk (which no longer exists) was reputed to be the easiest place to get one's higher degrees--it was claimed that the city's main products were
"herring, blueberries and doctoral promotions" (p. 177). Pettegree and Weduwen ably balance between treating books as goods and service circulating within an increasingly complex economic network, and in drawing from their contents as primary sources.
What did printers print?
Despite what the title of the book would lead one to think, a significant part of printers' business was not books at all. Official
publications--pamphlets
or broadsheets containing information about local market days or speculation about who
would be pope were a backbone of the print trade (p. 15). Posters (for which printers were
required to pay a tax) were also a huge part of printers' work now totally lost. Early newspapers are an important source for discovering the ephemera owned and bought by bourgeois readers: volumes such as almanacs, religious books in Dutch,
self-help books, or mathematical books rarely survive, but were a key part of the printer's trade. Advertisements
forthcoming titles in newspapers are the principle method of recovering these vanished books (p. 83). The importance of newspaper evidence is one that the authors return to multiple times (p. 383); such discoveries are made possible by the digitization of surviving newspapers. Indeed, the history and development of the newspaper is one of the book's most fascinating narrative threads. The early modern newspaper began as a single sheet, written in a highly formulaic style--far from the vehicle for breaking news we think of today! (p. 70). Another delightful bit of ephemera by which Dutch printers made their living was the wedding poem. In
the seventeenth century, when Dutch people got married, a wedding poem in praise of the young
couple was a key part of the ceremony. The happy couple might receive a poetry anthology as a gift, but they often also would also commission a poem, which would be presented
to the guests as little booklets (p. 231-2).
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| Wedding Poem Printed on Silk, Joannes Van den Eede, Batavia, 1674 [Source: White Rose Fine Art] |
In addition to posters, newspapers, and wedding poems, Dutch printers also made their living printing a wide variety of books, ranging from the bestselling adventure stories summarizing the feats of Dutch explorers ("the sea could make anyone a hero," the authors note, mentioning in passing that many of these explorers came from humble social backgrounds); to Dutch translations of religious and other books originally written in English; to small format books of Roman authors; to manuals of navigation; to books in Oriental languages. Although Dutch printers engaged with many languages besides their own, this did not necessarily lead to appreciation of these languages; as the minister Johannes Ubelman delightfully remarked, English is a language "botched together from all the languages of Europe" (p. 137).
Most fascinating for me are the letter writing manuals. In the early modern period, one of the barriers in the face of those seeking to climb the
social ladder was learning the rules of correspondence. The popularity of these books is demonstrated by their incredibly frequent appearance in auction catalogues. Titles ranged from Jean Puget de la Serre's Secretaire à la mode, a collection of model letters, to Heyman Jacobi's Gemeyne Send-Brieven (1612) and many more besides (p. 385).
Intriguingly, one area into which the all-encompassing reach of Dutch printers did not extend was books about scientific discoveries. According to the
authors, communication about scientific discoveries largely bypassed
print: scientists wrote to each other about their results, or they gave
tours of their labs. Rather than printing new discoveries, Dutch
printers preferred the more secure profits of publishing established
scientific
writers like William Harvey (p. 34).
Who bought printed books?
By early modern standards, I have a small book collection (and yet, I am still out of shelf space). Early modern scholars might own thousands of books, sometimes more than their local libraries (what a dream!) Auction records are a fascinating source, telling scholars not just what
was sold, but who was buying. Thus, we know that Danish book collectors
were particularly good customers of Dutch book auctions. The record also shows that ordinary men might also amass substantial libraries: a Dutch brewer in the 1680s had over a thousand books, a solider in the 1690s had 1500 (p. 3). Even ministers, who usually had very modest incomes, supplemented by a number of what we would now call side hustles, managed to build up their book
collections. The authors leave the story of how such modest collections were built to be told by others. Their explanation "If you are always around books, books come your way. This
is the art of collecting," (p. 296) leaves more questions than answers.
Superlative collectors stand out not just because they amassed more books than almost anyone else, but because there is in turn more evidence for their collections, due to their sheer size. Few collectors, were as prolific as the law professor Jacques Oisel, who owned approximately 14,000 volumes; preparing the posthumous auction catalogue took two years, and the sake of his collection was a national event (p. 292). For current and former librarians, who, like me, might be wondering how these prolific collectors organised their books, the authors refer us to the work of the seventeenth century French librarian Gabriel Naudé.
Libraries, at this stage of their history, were neither well-supported or well used, and were not among Dutch printer's star customers. An exception was the Utrecht municipal library. When founded in 1584, it
had about five or six hundred volumes, the hardy (and lucky) survivors from the collections of the city's monastic
monastic libraries, which had been plundered or destroyed during the civil wars between Dutch Catholics and Protestants. The library was house in the
Janskerk and grew significantly by donations, rather than purchases. The first catalogue, printed in 1608, shows that the collection had grown to about 6,000 books (p. 308). Jacques Oisel would not have been impressed.
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| The Bookshop of the World by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen |
Who were the printers?
One of the most fascinating aspects of The Bookshop of the World was its focus on Dutch printing businesses as family businesses, many of which had histories spanning a few generations. One printing family, the Elzeviers, who were infamous
among their contemporaries for undercutting rivals (pp. 273-4; p. 408). (The infamous modern academic publisher, Elsevier, took their inspiration, name, and logo from this family, but have no direct connection to them.)
Women were actively involved in these businesses. Indeed, as the authors argue towards the conclusion of the book, they were central to family print businesses, part of a broader culture of female participation in business. Given that so many Dutch men during the early modern period worked at sea, many women managed households on their own. Scholars have calculated that approximately
quarter of households were headed by women and many printing operations
were too.
I found the all-too-brief glimpses of women's stories absolutely fascinating. Early modern Dutch socetiy had high levels of literacy. The evidence for this shows up in some surprising places. There is a remarkable cache of Dutch letters, now in the National
Archives at Kew after being seized by the Royal Navy: most of them are by women to family stationed in
Curaçao and Batavia. The letters show that most women were literate,
even if some relied on model letters to help them write. In one of these letters, a
woman named Jannetje Jans writes that she was using a newspaper to
teach her daughter how to read, a truly delightful example of the intersections between printing and literacy (p. 400-1).
My one substantial criticism of this book is that standard bugbear of book reviewers, that the writers didn't write the things I wanted to read--namely, more about the role of women in the Dutch book trade. There are so many fascinating stories choose from! Take, for example, Machteld van Wouw, who
published the new States Bible, and fought a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful fight to enforce her
monopoly on this translation (p. 128). Or Susanna Veseler, a Catholic married to a Protestant,
Jan Jacobsz Schipper. (The seventeenth century Dutch Republic was not a time and place where interfaith marriage was common or easy.) Veseler
survived her husband by thirty years and made her living printing devotional literature. When she died, she was an extremely wealthy woman (p. 344). One might also cite Abigail May, Mercy Arnold, and many others. Pettegree and Weduwen sum up the role of women in printing a bit retrogressively, writing, "These were on the whole
tough, experience business women, prepared to strike a hard bargain, and
not above a little rough practice to outmanoeuvre a rival. But they
also brought a particular sensibility to the trade, not least the
particular needs of female readers...Mothers understood the power of
bedtime, and it was there that the piety and values of Dutch society
were first inculcated" (p. 403). It makes me want to seek out scholarship specifically on early modern Dutch women--I'm unconvinced by the claim that printers like Susanna Veseler saw themselves as serving female readers first and foremost.
As a last word: historical novelists, please move on from writing about the Dutch Masters, and consider women printers as your subject.
Beyond the Printshop
The history of the book trade involves a wide landscape of political, social and cultural history evoked by the printed word. This is perhaps where, as a reader unfamiliar with Dutch history, I lost the plot most often. The earliest chapters of The Bookshop of the World, which addressed the complex interactions of the print trade with conflicts between rival groups of Dutch Protestants, were hard going, although I did delight in learning the famous story of the jurist Hugo de Groot (Grotius), escaping what was supposed to be life in prison hidden in a book chest (p. 67).
At other points, the wider world beyond the print shop came to life. Consider the fact that the city of Amsterdam became a European center of Jewish printing and the home of the first Yiddish newspaper, a result of the city's large Jewish community, which was in turn a result of the expulsion of Sephardic Jewish communities from Spain and Portugal during the fifteenth century (p. 334). Or the fact that selling printed materials was part of how Dutch schoolmasters supported themselves and their families--then as now, a teacher's had to supplement their salaries to make ends meet, and there are records of teachers offering private lessons, selling school supplies and calligraphic exemplars, and working as carpenters, glaziers, farmers, or even innkeepers (p. 161). Perhaps my favourite of all these stories, is that of the incredibly unlucky German botanist, Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, who worked for the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the Dutch East India Company, and wrote the Ambonese Herbal, an illustrated compendium of over a thousand plants from Ambon Island and its archipelago. Rumphius went blind over the course of writing the book, his wife was killed by a tsunami, the plates of his
nearly completed manuscript burned up in a fire, his dictated text sunk
in a shipwreck, and then the (fortunately) copied text was then declared too
sensitive for publication by directors of the VOC. It took fifty years for
the book to be published at last (p. 352).
Views from Outside
The Bookshop of the World positions itself as recovering a forgotten history of Dutch prominence in printing (popularly forgotten, maybe; certainly well-remembered among scholars of early print!) Dutch printing, and printers, were famous their own day; as the London publisher Samuel Buckley commented, "Great estates have been gained in Holland by reprinting books written in France, with which, as well as with the classics, and other books of literature, the Dutch have for many years largely supplied England, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as Germany, and the Northern part of Europe." (p. 395) Dutch preeminence in the print trade did not last, but the books, newspapers, and other materials they printed, provide a window into this fascinating lost world.
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