Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2021

This article examines the earliest example of a Dutch printed songbook without musical notation in oblong format: Een Schoon Liedekensboeck (Antwerp, 1544), commonly known as the Antwerp Songbook. Its oblong format was probably inspired by music books, even if the advantages attached to this format only partially applied to songbooks without scores and notes. Even so, the Antwerp Songbook’s typography and lay-out do facilitate performance of the songs to some degree. Additionally, unlike contemporary books in oblong, this songbook’s title page is rotated 90 degrees to portrait orientation. This article contends that this hybrid shape underlines the book’s hybrid function: it was a music book intended for those who cannot or have no inclination to read music. Similarly, Een devoot ende profitelijck boecxken (Antwerp, 1539) stands out for having a comparable hybrid shape: it combines elements of music books (such as notes and the oblong format) with elements of vernacular song tradition and a title page in portrait orientation.

The De Geer family established themselves in Sweden as iron industrialists during the early seventeenth century, but they maintained close contact with the Netherlands. The family built up a prestigious library at Leufstabruk, in northern Uppland. The objects in the Leufsta Music Collection contained a significant amount of music in the form of printed sheet music and manuscripts, which were most likely gathered during the long lifetime of baron Charles De Geer (1720-1778). Compared to the works he collected in his youth in the Netherlands, the printed scores linked to Charles De Geer’s later period in Sweden show a change of taste in both repertoire and collecting behavior. This article deals with the bindings of the sheet music in the Leufsta collection, which give us clues of both De Geer’s acquisition and his approach to his music scores from their purchase to binding, labelling, cataloguing and practical use.

The memoirs that the Dutch nobleman Alexander Michiels van Kessenich (1800–1869) published in 1858–1859 offer a unique perspective on nineteenthcentury social music history. They were public in the sense of being printed, but private in the sense that the publication was not for sale. Because of a lack of editorial rigor the text comes across as a highly informal collection of personal musical memories. The unusual format of this publication is mirrored in its content. With his insistence that in their music making members of the aristocracy should avoid mingling with the lower classes and his obvious fondness for contemporary French opera, the musical memoirs of this Dutch nobleman demonstrate that to him, and probably many more like him, the burgeoning ideals of nineteenth-century middle-class music life were simply irrelevant.

The rise of the radio in the 1920s resulted in a new type of songbook that included the texts of popular broadcasted songs. They stand in the tradition of cheap popular songbooks from earlier centuries and song broadsides (‘liederencouranten’). Between 1930 and 1970, many hundreds of these radio songbooks were published, sometimes in long series and often with the same or similar titles. The production standards and materials were cheap and simple, although the publishers tried to give them an attractive and ‘typically Dutch’ look. One of the founding publishers of radio songbooks was Frans Rombouts from Roosendaal, a market vendor by origin. The biggest producer was the firm W.H. de Koning & Sons (also: Deko) in Rotterdam. The radio songbooks are a particular phenomenon of popular culture and a type of documentary heritage that deserves more attention from book and music historians and heritage institutions.

When record players became more widely available, authors and publishers began to investigate the potential uses of the new medium. Poets would record readings of their work, a younger generation experimented with sound effects and music, and live recordings of festivals became available. The relation between music and literature is multidimensional; this article focuses mainly on the use of music as a means to support the presentation of literature. My perspective is informed by the question: To what extent can the use of recorded music enhance the literary experience? The article describes the work of several publishers or other corporations. Artistic merit or musical quality are not the focus per se: this is about music as a means to an end. Although some of the results are interesting, there are surprisingly few places where the two actually meet. The explanation for these modest results can be found in artistic as well as commercial factors.

This article revisits the discussion whether The dialoges of creatures moralysed, the English translation of the Dialogus creaturarum, was printed and published by the early sixteenth-century Antwerp publishers-printers Marten de Keyser or Jan van Doesborch. This investigation presents a more complete picture of the publishing repertoire of Van Doesborch for the English market and increases our knowledge about the relations between publishers in Antwerp in the first half of the sixteenth century. After reconsidering the attributions to De Keyser and Van Doesborch I will bring up arguments in favour of their colleague Willem Vorsterman as publisher of The dialoges of creatures moralysed. By 1530/31 Vorsterman had access to part of the printing material of Jan van Doesborch as well as to a Bastarde letter type – probably cut by De Keyser – that is the same as the one used in The dialoges of creatures.

Jan David’s Duodecim specula (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1610) is a meditative emblem book, centred around myriad mirror metaphors. However, it also contains various depictions of ‘real’ optical instruments, such as lenses and concave mirrors, which have not yet been studied as such. This article explores how catoptrics and dioptrics (optical reflection and refraction) inform the meditative programme laid out in Duodecim specula. In the emblems and text, it will be argued, Jan David relies on a type of public knowledge of optics, which he expected the reader to possess. By tapping into this reservoir of optical knowledge and adding onto it, the book stimulates the affective reading process and hands the reader concrete tools for performing the meditative programme.

This article examines one of the earliest periodicals published in the Dutch Republic, the hitherto unknown Nederlantse Mercurius (1665). Only a single issue of this monthly journal has survived, but its publication history can be enriched considerably thanks to extant newspaper advertisements. This article investigates the Nederlantse Mercurius in the context of the growth of the periodical market in the seventeenth century; in the context of the career and family ties of the man responsible for the journal, the Amsterdam printer Joost Otto Smient, a young publisher launching his first independent venture; and in the context of the European news market.

Since 1940, the Rotterdamsch Leeskabinet’s collection includes the library of the Rotterdam Van Rijckevorsel family. The library, with a size of 3,000 titles, was formed in the nineteenth century by three generations: the entrepreneurs Abram and Huibert and the scientist Elie van Rijckevorsel. The library is a unique example of a preserved library of a Rotterdam patrician family from the nineteenth century.

This article examines the nature and composition of the library. It turns out not to be a collector’s library, but an organically grown, hybrid library, in which the professional practice, interests and social position of the family members are reflected. Functional books stood alongside rare antiquarian editions, and literature next to scientific works. Notable is the large number of books on geography, especially with regards to Dutch overseas trading areas. In order to determine whether this library is representative of book collections of Rotterdam’s elite families, more research is needed.

The library of the Dutch House of Representatives is a collection of thirty thousand books in the fields of constitutional law and Dutch politics. The collection is rooted in the nineteenth century and has seen the various stages of expansion and decline typical to a library of use. In recent years, the historical book collection has been brought together in a single location for the first time in its history. The books are placed in a four-stories high nineteenth century library that is known as the ‘Handelingenkamer’. Bringing the collection together in one place has created a visual reflection of two centuries of Dutch parliamentary history. This article explores the history of the collection as a whole, not only as a library for the support of the work of parliamentarians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also as a collection and library space that has representative value which can be employed for temporary exhibitions and educational purposes.

In 2014 a digitization plan of the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice was leaked. One of the plans mentioned was the closing of physical prison libraries. The media attention and criticism that this plan received raised questions about a normally invisible institution: the Dutch prison library. In this article we will see that prerequisites for the official foundation of the prison library in 1841 were the upswing of the prison sentence, the growing involvement in the spiritual faith of detainees and the growth of the book market and a literate audience. At first the libraries had an educational function only, but towards the end of the twentieth century they became more all-encompassing. Thanks to the arrival of librarians they also became more professional. Interviews with prison librarians show that the prison library nowadays has several functions: recreational, educational, informative and social. Digitization will be to the detriment of the rich experience that the physical prison library offers.