Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis - Volume 31, Issue 2024, 2024

In 1609, Philippus Nisius, minister of the Dutch village of Klaaswaal, published the pamphlet De Wapenen des Geestelijcken Leeken ofte Boeren Crijchs. Like many other pamphlets in this period, its tone was fiercely anti-Catholic. Embedded within the contents of this booklet, however, is also a broader theological discussion of the doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell, which led to controversy in the Dordrecht classis, coinciding with the then prolific disputes of the Twelve Years’ Truce. A closer analysis of this pamphlet and its contexts provides valuable insight into the genesis of the Reformed Church in the Dutch Republic, as well as drawing attention to the religious plurality during the early Seventeenth Century.

In 1667 the Dutch physician Johannes Fridericus Helvetius published the book Vitulus aureus, in which he described an unannounced visit by a mysterious alchemist at his house in The Hague. This stranger, who went by the name of Elias Artiste, claimed to possess pieces of the Philosopher’s Stone and proceeded to instruct Helvetius in how to transmute lead into gold. A short time after the publication of Vitulus aureus, Helvetius’ account achieved both notoriety and acclaim amongst European intellectuals and stimulated fierce debates concerning its alchemical contents. The polemic response to Helvetius’ book was indicative of the ambivalent status of alchemy in intellectual circles during the latter decades of the seventeenth-century. The complicated reception of this alchemical eyewitness account would turn out to be a precursor to the emerging distinction in eighteenth-century European academia, between a rational chemical science on the one hand, and an irrational alchemical tradition on the other.

Between 1940 and 1945, three originally German children’s books about Adolf Hitler circulated in translation in the Netherlands at the behest of the Nazi regime: Moeder, vertel eens wat van Adolf Hitler! (Mother, tell us something about Adolf Hitler!) in 1942 by Johanna Haarer, De Führer (The Führer) in 1943 by Erich Beier-Lindhardt and Wij hebben den Führer gezien (We have seen the Führer) in 1944 by Wilhelm Dissmann. The intention behind this was to instigate a similar Führer cult as in Nazi Germany and to indoctrinate the Dutch youth with the national socialist ideology. This article focuses on how these books functioned in the Netherlands during the German occupation. It analyses how these works were produced, distributed and received, as well as how the Nazi ideology was transmitted to young readers.

In February 2023, a controversy emerged over proposed changes to Roald Dahl’s children’s books by the publisher Puffin. The modifications aimed to make the books more inclusive and sensitive to modern readers. Changes included altering character descriptions to avoid potentially offensive terms, adding contextual information to clarify statements, and using gender-neutral language in place of gender-specific terms. The news sparked debates in both the British and Dutch media, with some defending the updates as necessary for contemporary readers while others decried them as censorship and cultural vandalism. As this essay will show, the controversy particularly highlights the ongoing academic discussion surrounding adaptations of children’s literature. While the Roald Dahl controversy has stirred strong emotions in the public sphere, it will be shown how it is, from a translation studies perspective, part of a broader pattern in the process of republishing children’s literature, where adaptations serve various audiences and address evolving societal values. As such, the essay underlines the complex and dynamic nature of children’s literature and the publishing industry today.

This article offers an overview of libraries labelled publica in the Spanish Netherlands in the period 1600-1660. The bibliotheca publica began to emerge in that region at the beginning of the century, seemingly following examples elsewhere in Europe. Scholarship concerning those early ‘public libraries’ in the Habsburg Netherlands has been scant, and mostly focuses on one or two specific institutions. This research reveals the existence of six libraries that were considered publica, and two more attempts at establishing a bibliotheca publica that remained unaccomplished. The article furthermore explores their shared characteristics, such as location, founders, their dependency on donations and the seeming continuity with earlier libraries. These elements are also connected to the strong influence of the Counter-reformation in the Spanish Netherlands.

This is an exploratory study of printing privileges requested by literary authors in the Dutch Republic during the long seventeenth century. Copyright for authors in the Netherlands was only formally arranged in the nineteenth century, but authors claimed ownership over their texts before that as well. Printing privileges were one of the instruments available to authors, although these were most often requested by booksellers. Moreover, requesting a printing privilege could harm an author’s reputation, especially in the case of literary authors, for whom financial advancement was a taboo. Still, some literary authors did request printing privileges. This article is based on an analysis of both the requests and the use of these privileges by literary authors, and shows how both financial advancement and reputation management were important motives for them. As such, this article argues book historians should regard printing privileges as more than only protection against piracy.

This contribution focuses on the intellectual and historical question about the significance of the French book trade for the European Enlightenment, with special attention to Amsterdam. The city was an important center of book production and housed a large French-speaking community, especially after the arrival of Huguenots and other immigrants. Their presence stimulated not only the production of French books, but also the development of new media, such as intellectual magazines and political press. These dynamics contributed to Amsterdam’s role as the center of the European knowledge society and the early Enlightenment. Although the influence of the Huguenots on the Dutch bookselling industry was limited quantatively, they nevertheless made an important contribution to the European intellectual debate and the early developments of the Enlightenment. Without the Refuge with Bernard and Rey as undisputed champions, the European Enlightenment would have missed an important publication channel and would probably have acquired a different character.

It is well known that bookbinders reused parchment leaves from discarded manuscripts to strengthen the bindings of new books. So far, little attention has been paid to the reuse of the bookbinding materials that have been reused in bookbindings. In this article we focus on these materials that have been recycled in bookbindings, e.g. boards, covers, wrappers, metal fastenings, ivory plaques. Using online databases with digitized books to check the bindings we were able to find many new examples of reuse in addition to the examples we came across in our daily work with books. Our corpus of 189 bindings enabled us to identify different types of reuse. This article presents our preliminary findings and provides a framework for recognising different types of recycled binding materials. With this framework we hope to pave the way for further research.