International publishing in the Netherlands had a glorious tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A remarkable revival took place after 1933, when several Dutch publishers began to issue books written by exiles of the Nazi regime in the German language. The decline of German scholarly and scientific publishing during the same time inspired a number of other Dutch publishers to expand their programs or start new ones. As the English language became more prominent internationally, enterprising Dutch publishers began to explore these markets as well. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands, a number of printers began to produce finely printed books and pamphlets in many languages clandestinely, as an act of defiance or to raise money for underground causes. This book documents these trends and events in the form of a series of bio-bibliographical portraits of the major participating publishers.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch Republic performed a crucial function as the cultural and intellectual clearinghouse of Europe. It was partly through the existence of a well-established and highly competitive publishing industry and book trade that the Dutch were able to play such a prominent role in the international transmission of knowledge and ideas. Yet our understanding of the Dutch involvement in the European book trade still is limited and important questions remain to be answered. How was Dutch publishing and bookselling for the international market organised? What was the nature of the books that were exchanged? In order to stimulate research in this field an international colloquium was held in 1990 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), under the title "'Le Magasin de l'Univers.' The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade". This volume brings together the twenty-two contributions presented at the conference by historians of the book from England, France, Switzerland, the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The history of printing, books, and libraries, is confined only to a limited extent within the boundaries of individual countries. There are, indeed, few historical developments which have played a more universal role, in reaction against all kinds of particularism, than type design, printing, book production, publishing, illustration, binding, librarianship, journal ism, and related subjects. Their history should be assessed and studied primarily in an international, not in a local, context. The bibliographical resources, however, which the historian of these sub jects has at his disposal correspond hardly at all to the essentially inter national character of the object of his studies. Since the appearance of the retrospective bibliography of BIG MORE and WYMAN, covering the subject comprehensively up to r88o, the only current bibliography has been the lnternationale Bibliographie des Buck-und Bi bliothekswesens. Covering a representative part of newly published liter ature, it appeared from rgz8, but did not survive the Second World War. More recently, several useful, but limited, bibliographies have appeared.
This book resulted from a desire to understand the role of pamphlets in the political life of that most curious early modern state, the Dutch Republic. The virtues of abundance and occasional liveliness have made "little blue books," as they were called, a favorite historical source-that is why I came to study them in the first place. I But the more I dug into pamphlets for this fact or that, the more questions I had about their 2 contemporary purpose and role. Who wrote pamphlets and why? For whom were they intended? How and by whom were pamphlets brought to press and distributed, and what does this reveal? Why did their number increase so greatly? Who read them? How were pamphlets different from other media? In short, I began to view pamphlets not as repositories of historical facts but as a historical phenomenon in their own right. 3 I have looked for answers to these questions in governmental and church records, private letters, publishing records and related materials about printers, booksellers, and pamphleteers, and of course in pam phlets themselves. Like so many other students of the early press and its products, I discovered only scattered, incomplete images of actual con ditions, such as the readership or popularity of pamphlets. On the other hand, I found much material which reflected what people believed about "little books.
In honor of the German historian Hermann Wellenreuther, this volume explores the Atlantic world in all its many facets and extraordinary scope. Experts from different fields address economic problems as well as religious convictions, on the social differences and the everyday life experiences of the "ordinary people" as well as the aristocracy and the politics of princes. Taken together, the articles weave together German, English and American history and help us to understand the Atlantic societies on both sides of the ocean from the Middle Ages to the present. Claudia Schnurmann is professor at the Department of History at the University of Hamburg (Germany). Hartmut Lehmann is professor at the Max-Planck-Institute for History, Goettingen (Germany).
This book gives a detailed description of all books, published in the Dutch Republic and its Generality Lands between 1567 and 1773 – the year in which the Society of Jesus was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV for political reasons –, written by Jesuits from the Low Countries and elsewhere. Locations of the books are given, as far as possible, as well as bibliographical sources. Many of these publications are pirate editions, mainly from France and Germany. Technical and historical introductions precede this bibliography, and several indexes and registers conclude this work. The titles show the areas in which Jesuits have been active, and indicate their influence in many fields. A similar work has never been attempted before.
A comprehensive documentation, based mainly on original research, of the sources of the German dictionaries and vocabularies published between 1600 and 1700. With its 1,150 entries, it also provides information on numerous multi-lingual dictionaries, covering some 30 other languages.