This project arose from an earlier investigation of the beginnings of a serial press in the Dutch Republic. In the course of gathering data for Arthur der Weduwen’s Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2017), a bibliography that lists separately every issue of a Dutch-language newspaper published in the Low Countries, it became clear that paid advertising played a precocious and increasingly important role in the success of the serial press in the Dutch Golden Age. While this earlier volume noted the number of advertisements and public announcements published in each issue, it became clear that there was scope for a separate study, focussed on the texts of these notices. This further project has two crucial elements. Firstly, we present the texts of the advertisements and public announcements for interested readers and future generations of researchers. To increase their accessibility, these texts have been presented in English translation. In addition, because in the first generations of newspaper production the advertisements carried in the newspapers were almost exclusively for new books, we resolved to match, where possible, all the editions advertised with known copies. That portion of the advertised books that could not be matched constitute a part of early book production that is attracting increasing interest from scholars today: lost books, that is, editions known to have been published but not yet identified in a surviving copy. That these editions are so numerous in this study offers readers a precious window on a segment of the book world as lucrative to publishers as these books were valued by their owners; so much so, indeed, that they were often used to destruction.
This project was initially intended to have a third element, a lenghty commentary on the place of these advertisements in the contemporary newspaper world, the gradually extending range of advertising into other areas of commerce and public information, and the influence of this precocious Dutch market on later newspaper practice. As we developed these themes, however, it became clear that these arguments deserved a more extensive treatment than would be possible in an introduction. We have therefore reserved this analysis for a separate monograph, published simultaneously as The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising. We have, however, ensured that both this survey and the monograph volume are complete in themselves, and can be consulted separately, even though mutually supporting.
In completing this work, our most immediate debt goes to Arjan van Dijk at Brill, for his enthusiastic support of this shift from one book to two. It has been a pleasure to work with Arjan and Francis Knikker, along with their talented designers, to bring these projects to fruition. In the course of the translation work, we made considerable use of Delpher, the free access online database offering digital texts of Dutch newspapers; issues not in Delpher we inspected in their holding institutions. We have also valued very much our co-operation with Nicoline van der Sijs, whose transcriptions of early Dutch newspapers, pursued in co-operation with the Delpher project, are a model of a successful crowd-sourcing project. Our students, Hanna de Lange, James McCall and Jacob Baxter, offered sharp and illuminating reflections on our developing ideas, which have found their way into both texts. We are grateful also to the colleagues in Dutch universities who have given us the opportunity to share speculations and provisional conclusions as the project matured. Most important of all, we acknowledge an enormous debt to successive generations of colleagues working on the Universal Short Title Catalogue (
Finally, we should extend our thanks to the subject of this study, the men and women who by investing a few stuivers on an advertisement, brought us into their workshops and business calculations, or shared their family and personal dramas. These notices, sometimes heart-rending, often indignant or outraged, throw a vivid light on ordinary lives touched unexpectedly by misfortune or tragedy. Historians owe them a debt of gratitude for turning to the new media of the newspaper to seek recompense or healing. Thanks to the newspapers, they will not now be forgotten.
St Andrews, July 2019