Download And Enjoy The Bookshop Of The World: Making And Trading Books In The Dutch Golden Age Engineered By Andrew Pettegree Supplied As Print
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 literacyliteracy in the historical past or lack of it being an academic interest of mine.
The book did not disappointfor 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 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, 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 fews popular picks, Who knew that newspaper advertising, lotteries, and propaganda all come from the Dutch : 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 outstandingbook 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 ones 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 submarkets 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 ayears.
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 thes is amazing,
It is a long book but well worth the effort, 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 cleareyed vision,
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:
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.
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.
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 massmarket 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.
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.
Outstanding and detailed history of printing and publishing in the Netherlands during theth 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.
.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 whats in our libraries is not the best lease with which to look at what books people were actually reading.
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 coauthor 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,
A really interesting topic, but I just wasn't feeling it at this time, Perhaps I'll get back to it one day, 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
"An excellent contribution to book history.
"Robert Darnton, New York 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 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 wellinformed 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.
I 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 incompleted a survey of all books published before: the Universal Short Title Catalogue, This work continues with work to incorporate new discoveries and continue the survey into the seventeenth century, InI published an award winning st I 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 incompleted a survey of all books published before: the Universal Short Title Catalogue, This work continues with work to incorporate new discoveries and continue the survey into the seventeenth century, InI published an award winning study of The Book in the Renaissance, and inThe Invention of News: a study of the birth of a commercial culture of news publication in the four centuries betweenand.
I return to the Reformation for a study of Luthers media strategy, published inby Penguin as Brand Luther,, 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 inas 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.
InI 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, sitelink.