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The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age
The untold story of how the Dutch conquered the European book market and became the world's greatest bibliophiles—“an instant classic on Dutch book history” ( BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review )
"[An] excellent contribution to book history."—Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books
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 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.
"[An] excellent contribution to book history."—Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books
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 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.
496 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2019
92 people are currently reading
891 people want to read
About the author
Andrew Pettegree
38 books102 followersI began my career working on aspects of the European Reformation. My first book was a study of religious refugee communities in the sixteenth century, and since then I have published on the Dutch Revolt, and on the Reformation in Germany, France and England, as well as a general survey history of the sixteenth century. In the last years the focus of my research has shifted towards an interest in the history of communication, and especially the history of the book. I run a research group that in 2011 completed a survey of all books published before1601: the Universal Short Title Catalogue. This work continues with work to incorporate new discoveries and continue the survey into the seventeenth century.
In 2010 I published an award-winning study of The Book in the Renaissance, and in 2014 The Invention of News: a study of the birth of a commercial culture of news publication in the four centuries between 1400 and 1800. I return to the Reformation for a study of Luther’s media strategy, published in 2015 by Penguin as Brand Luther, 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. I am now engaged in a study of the book world of the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, to be published in 2019 as Trading Books in the Age of Rembrandt.
I am the lead editor of two monograph series: the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and The Library of the Written Word. In 2012-2015 I served a three year term as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.
I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students working on any aspect of the Reformation or Book History.
In 2010 I published an award-winning study of The Book in the Renaissance, and in 2014 The Invention of News: a study of the birth of a commercial culture of news publication in the four centuries between 1400 and 1800. I return to the Reformation for a study of Luther’s media strategy, published in 2015 by Penguin as Brand Luther, 1517, Printing and the Making of the Reformation. I am now engaged in a study of the book world of the seventeenth century Dutch Republic, to be published in 2019 as Trading Books in the Age of Rembrandt.
I am the lead editor of two monograph series: the St Andrews Studies in Reformation History, and The Library of the Written Word. In 2012-2015 I served a three year term as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society.
I welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students working on any aspect of the Reformation or Book History.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 18, 2019
Economic/business history is a somewhat strange area to poke around in sometimes. Some accounts are good stories, akin to historical fiction with a bit more documentary basis. Others are closer to economics studies that happen to deal with historical actors (the work of the “cliometricians” like Fogel, Engerman, or North come to mind). This can be really fine work, although readers should dust off their reviews of regression analysis and economic models. In between or historical analyses that make great use of exotic data sources and draw insights out of the data without becoming so abstract that the work in inaccessible. Chandler is a standard here, but there is lots of good work.
Andrew Pettegree is a British historian who wrote an outstanding 2010 book - The Book in the Renaissance. He studied how the “business model” for book publishing developed after the invention of the movable type printing press. He starts with the production constraints on the printing of major volumes (uncertain demand, costly to keep capacity inactive while waiting to print more; uncertainty of customer behavior since many of one’s potential customers for large volumes already have lots of books, etc.) and then developed his analysis from there. It is an insightful book and a brilliant study.
The current volume looks at the Dutch bookselling industry about a hundred years later, from the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth century (the Dutch “Golden Age”) and beyond. He makes the case that the bookselling industry was hugely important to the Dutch and that it was the leader across Europe leading the industry to evolve in ways that fundamentally shaped its development into the modern era. How can he do this? He identified where the printing presses were and he tracked how booksellers listed their inventories for sale in the new institution of newspapers (one needs a printing press for them too). There are similar technology constraints on printing different sorts of jobs as there were for Gutenberg. Pettegree goes well beyond this by identifying the different customers and institutions that commissioned books and other printing jobs, including universities, churches, private schools, municipalities and other government institutions, and rich private clients. He also did a good job at locating the publishing industry in the political and cultural context of the seventeenth century - to show the topics that people wanted to read and write about.
The third aspect of the study is the distinction Pettigree makes between international and domestic sub-markets for books. Some books were sold to foreign markets. Others were purchased internationally for domestic consumption, still others were purchased internationally and resold to other countries. Finally, there was the purely domestic market, which he argues was most important for the long term success of the industry.
The unfolding of this analysis provides a flood of insights that I could not begin to address adequately in a short review. Around most points are a variety of “nooks and crannies” that make a reader stop and think. For example, part of the growth of publishers came from links to universities, who made candidates for credentials purchase nontrivial production runs of their theses at their own expense as a condition of graduating. ...and you think being a grad student is hard today!
What the reader gets here is nothing short of a detailed analysis of a major industry with plenty of historical context over the course of a 150 years. Ok, so the text is a bit of a slog at times, but who cares? This is a history of the first Information Age when the key technology was the printing press. The comparisons with today are striking and he can do this because he has a well defined market setting, fairly detailed records of what books were published and sold, and a set of production and governance constraints that are understandable and reasonably bounded. These conditions are very hard to get in a well done industry study today. To take the story back to the 1600s is amazing.
It is a long book but well worth the effort.
Andrew Pettegree is a British historian who wrote an outstanding 2010 book - The Book in the Renaissance. He studied how the “business model” for book publishing developed after the invention of the movable type printing press. He starts with the production constraints on the printing of major volumes (uncertain demand, costly to keep capacity inactive while waiting to print more; uncertainty of customer behavior since many of one’s potential customers for large volumes already have lots of books, etc.) and then developed his analysis from there. It is an insightful book and a brilliant study.
The current volume looks at the Dutch bookselling industry about a hundred years later, from the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth century (the Dutch “Golden Age”) and beyond. He makes the case that the bookselling industry was hugely important to the Dutch and that it was the leader across Europe leading the industry to evolve in ways that fundamentally shaped its development into the modern era. How can he do this? He identified where the printing presses were and he tracked how booksellers listed their inventories for sale in the new institution of newspapers (one needs a printing press for them too). There are similar technology constraints on printing different sorts of jobs as there were for Gutenberg. Pettegree goes well beyond this by identifying the different customers and institutions that commissioned books and other printing jobs, including universities, churches, private schools, municipalities and other government institutions, and rich private clients. He also did a good job at locating the publishing industry in the political and cultural context of the seventeenth century - to show the topics that people wanted to read and write about.
The third aspect of the study is the distinction Pettigree makes between international and domestic sub-markets for books. Some books were sold to foreign markets. Others were purchased internationally for domestic consumption, still others were purchased internationally and resold to other countries. Finally, there was the purely domestic market, which he argues was most important for the long term success of the industry.
The unfolding of this analysis provides a flood of insights that I could not begin to address adequately in a short review. Around most points are a variety of “nooks and crannies” that make a reader stop and think. For example, part of the growth of publishers came from links to universities, who made candidates for credentials purchase nontrivial production runs of their theses at their own expense as a condition of graduating. ...and you think being a grad student is hard today!
What the reader gets here is nothing short of a detailed analysis of a major industry with plenty of historical context over the course of a 150 years. Ok, so the text is a bit of a slog at times, but who cares? This is a history of the first Information Age when the key technology was the printing press. The comparisons with today are striking and he can do this because he has a well defined market setting, fairly detailed records of what books were published and sold, and a set of production and governance constraints that are understandable and reasonably bounded. These conditions are very hard to get in a well done industry study today. To take the story back to the 1600s is amazing.
It is a long book but well worth the effort.
March 24, 2024
This was a fun and fascinating read. I love Andrew Pettegree, whose enthusiasm for books and the history of the book trade matches my own. (I loved The Library, and I’m looking forward to reading his new one, The Book At War, later this year.) This was a detailed look at an (admittedly) very niche, but extraordinary period — the 17th century Dutch Republic, and its rise to prominence in the European book trade. Pettegree shows that this rise was driven primarily by the Dutch domestic market’s voracious appetite for books, home to a unusually literate and well-educated population. Well written and highly enjoyable.
October 11, 2019
A fascinating academic study of the book trade in the Dutch golden Age, which suffers from time to time from dry overly scholarly text, yet is a vital reconstruction of a bibliophilic moment in time.
I have read an earlier book by Pettegree about the Book in the Renaissance, and it was marvelous both in it research and it's tone and readability for a general reader.
Bookshop- not quite.
at too many times the narrative is about lists of books and numbers rather than events or people or even information about these lost books.
Perhaps this is a by product of the research undertaken for this study/book. Pettegree and co-author Arthur der Weduwen spent many hours days and months digging through archives, often through piles of uncatalogued material hunting for book catalogs, pamphlets and other ephemera to reconstruct books that have no surviving copies, books that were so widely used that were often read until they fell apart and were replaced. It is amongst these books that the true tale of the Dutch publishing industry lies. Indeed because of the time and other expenditures perhaps the Authors felt compelled to justify the research by listing said materials, which bogs down the flow of the narrative.
An important look into vernacular printing during the Dutch Golden Age. Scrupulously researched and well worth fighting through to the finish.
I have read an earlier book by Pettegree about the Book in the Renaissance, and it was marvelous both in it research and it's tone and readability for a general reader.
Bookshop- not quite.
at too many times the narrative is about lists of books and numbers rather than events or people or even information about these lost books.
Perhaps this is a by product of the research undertaken for this study/book. Pettegree and co-author Arthur der Weduwen spent many hours days and months digging through archives, often through piles of uncatalogued material hunting for book catalogs, pamphlets and other ephemera to reconstruct books that have no surviving copies, books that were so widely used that were often read until they fell apart and were replaced. It is amongst these books that the true tale of the Dutch publishing industry lies. Indeed because of the time and other expenditures perhaps the Authors felt compelled to justify the research by listing said materials, which bogs down the flow of the narrative.
An important look into vernacular printing during the Dutch Golden Age. Scrupulously researched and well worth fighting through to the finish.
July 5, 2019
A few weeks ago I walked into my favourite Toronto bookstore, Ben McNally Books (Bay Street just south of City Hall) and found this book staring at me from the first stack. I had to have it, given my own Dutch heritage and my guess that this book would have something to say about Dutch literacy--literacy in the historical past (or lack of it) being an academic interest of mine. The book did not disappoint--for the most part. It opened a window on Dutch life during the Netherlands' Golden Era that I was utterly unfamiliar with. Perspective by incongruity, you could say (along with Kenneth Burke). Following the many different ways in which the printing press and book trade brought wealth, controversy, and learning to the Netherlands was utterly fascinating. And there was interesting reading about the impact of high literacy in the Netherlands, too. Why not five stars? Well, I'm a generalist, I guess, and this book was so chock full of fascinating vignettes and long explanations of minor points that it was just too much sometimes. But mostly, at least, too much of a good thing. I highly recommend this to those interested in Dutch history, especially if you'd like a sideways look at it.
February 25, 2021
Masterful writing about history. Assumes a basic knowledge of the events surrounding the founding of the Dutch Republic, avoids any grand theories or reinterpretations, and explores many aspects of Dutch society in the Golden Age. Scholarly work, so detail oriented, but it did not get stuck in them: there was always a larger point. I loved it too for its distance from any nation building narratives. It mentions many famous stories (tulipmania, Hugo de Groot's escape from Loevestein, the Siege of Leiden) with brevity and clear-eyed vision.
A favorite quote:
And another one, to demonstrate there is nothing new under the sun:
A favorite quote:
The books that survive the best are those that do find their way into a library, often very quickly after publication, and they have survived the centuries in between often because they were not in fact much read. This is the strange paradox that confronts all those who look to books as a window on the soul of past societies.
And another one, to demonstrate there is nothing new under the sun:
[The States General] learned one of the bitterest lessons of pursuing politics in print, that an attack on a rival authority inevitably weakens the public's trust in authority itself.
April 10, 2020
Outstanding and detailed history of printing and publishing in the Netherlands during the 17th century. What we think of as the Dutch Golden Age could not have happened as it did without the contributions of the publishing industry to a literate population.
October 22, 2024
Written with passion and very well-researched. You basically learn how the European book market worked during the 17-18th century and you get some nice anecdotes along the way. Bought this in Amsterdam, the heart of book shops in the Dutch book trade golden age
April 21, 2024
The title of this is somewhat deceiving, because truly it’s about print in general and the utilization of print within the Dutch golden age society.
This book provides a pretty comprehensive look at Dutch history, from religion to politics to education to art. I was very pleasantly surprised by the scope of it.
That being said, it is HELLA wordy, and probably could have been organized a little better, in my opinion. Themes trail off and pick back up chapters later, and there’s a good bit of redundant content. It’s not horrible, but a little more organization would have made the general thesis more solid and easy to follow, I think. (The amount of time spent tallying various prices also got exhausting for me. Alas, I did say it was thorough 🤓 (and niche).)
Oh, and the brief mention about women in printing at the very very end, I would have loved that to be more than a paragraph footnote, and perhaps have been given its own section.
All in all, a bit of a mixed bag for me. Fascinating content, frequently boring writing.
This book provides a pretty comprehensive look at Dutch history, from religion to politics to education to art. I was very pleasantly surprised by the scope of it.
That being said, it is HELLA wordy, and probably could have been organized a little better, in my opinion. Themes trail off and pick back up chapters later, and there’s a good bit of redundant content. It’s not horrible, but a little more organization would have made the general thesis more solid and easy to follow, I think. (The amount of time spent tallying various prices also got exhausting for me. Alas, I did say it was thorough 🤓 (and niche).)
Oh, and the brief mention about women in printing at the very very end, I would have loved that to be more than a paragraph footnote, and perhaps have been given its own section.
All in all, a bit of a mixed bag for me. Fascinating content, frequently boring writing.
February 22, 2022
At the time, when I made this a potential read, I'll admit that I really didn't know what I was getting, apart from an examination of the Dutch book industry. It turns out that this book is much more then that, in that it's really an examination of how the Netherlands became the first mass-market print society. This is as what really interests the authors is the processes of how print managed to insinuate its way into all levels of Dutch society. I also really liked how the authors explained their research methodology, and how modern digital resources allowed them to do a very thorough survey of what might have existed. Yes, this work does presuppose some familiarity with the period in question but, otherwise, this is a really great piece of accessible scholarship.
April 30, 2024
I love books about books. The more details the better, the thicker the book, the more I seem to enjoy reading it. However, I may have finally met my match. There were a few parts in this book which simply contained too much minutia, supporting historical, political, socioeconomic information, to plow through. I did get through those sections and was rewarded by information which I found more interesting. It was a hard read, but I am now happy to have it on my books about books shelves for reference. I picture a time in the future, when my children are packing up my library, take a moment to look into some of my books, perhaps this one, and see all my notations and thoughts, only to go "good grief, dad".
December 30, 2021
I often find that the histories I found the most interesting and thought provoking are those that use a small facet of our lives to examine a larger historic moment. This book on books did exactly that. Knowing a little about the Dutch Republic going into this book, the examination of book printing and selling was a fascinating way to reorient and look at things from a new angle. It was also a fascinating look into what books have and have not been preserved overtime, and why what’s in our libraries is not the best lease with which to look at what books people were actually reading.
May 26, 2023
This book is thoroughly researched and well written, but some of the details are excruciating. I learned a lot about European and Dutch history, and about early printing practices. For instance, in the 17th century, new books were sold unbound; the purchaser had to take the book to a bindery, adding to the coat of an already expensive possession. But I think the book could have been about 25% shorter and still given me all the information I wanted.
November 15, 2019
Very well researched and enjoyable to read! I especially liked the insights into various libraries of the wealthy and the not so wealthy...gave me some inspiration to read a few 1600’s popular picks. Who knew that newspaper advertising, lotteries, and propaganda all come from the Dutch :) ?
November 28, 2019
Zeer interessant! Op een toegankelijke manier geschreven. Veel Nederlandse geschiedenis (achtergrondinformatie) wat het nog leuker en interessanter maakt.
Een aanrader, ook voor mensen die niet de master boekwetenschap volgen ;)
Een aanrader, ook voor mensen die niet de master boekwetenschap volgen ;)
April 13, 2021
I have read the preview on Kindle and I think that this book is excellent and is in sync with what is already available about the Dutch book trade as a result of the successes of the Dutch East India Company, a very good read. I have ordered my personal copy.
September 15, 2024
What a book, what a read, what a story. I loved it. This should be the starting point of any study into the history of Dutch books, printers and readers in the 17th century. Read both the Dutch and English editions at the same time, which was also helpful.
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October 18, 2019A really interesting topic, but I just wasn't feeling it at this time. Perhaps I'll get back to it one day....
December 25, 2022
This might be a fairly niche read, but if you are interested in the book trade as it grew and developed into the thing it is today, put this on your shelf.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews