On a dreary Chicago afternoon I found myself with Andrew Pettegree and a small group of early modernists in a cramped and unassuming sports bar. A few hours earlier we had arrived in town for the Renaissance Society of America, which was holding its annual meeting in the Palmer Hilton Hotel a few blocks up the road. Surrounded by tv screens and people sporting Chicago Bears jerseys, the waitress took our orders. Most people in our booth ordered beer or soda. When it was Andrew’s turn, he asked whether the bar served English breakfast tea. With a slight frown the waitress said they had Earl Grey and several flavours of fruit tea. ‘I prepared for that’, Andrew said, digging up a crumpled tea bag from his pocket. ‘I’ll have a cup of hot water, please.’
Using words like ‘jolly’ and ‘nippy’, Andrew has always been profoundly and proudly British. Over the years, we would quibble over British vs Dutch work ethics, with Andrew never failing to express his bewilderment over Brill’s empty office on Fridays, to which I would counter that Brill staff work so efficiently that we can afford to strike a healthy balance between work and private life. Occasionally our competition would enter the realm of history, but it’s hard to win an argument with one of the world’s leading historians. Yet I could always comfort myself by reading one of Andrew’s many writings about the unrivalled greatness of the Dutch printing press.
I first contacted Andrew in late 2002 to ask if he would be willing to prepare a list of titles for inclusion in a primary-source collection of works against Calvin. At the time I worked for IDC, a small Leiden-based publisher, which captured rare books and archival materials on microfiche and sold them to the academic market. It took some time for the project to get off the ground, until Malcolm Walsby, then AHRC Project Manager at the University of St Andrews, demonstrated how easy it was to pull a list from the database underlying the French Vernacular Book Project, the forerunner of the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC). Thanks to Malcolm’s technical savviness, we were able to publish two highly original primary-source collections, one on the Huguenots and one of writings against Calvin.1 True to the nature of the French Vernacular Book Project, which aimed to offer a survey of all books printed in the French language up to 1601, the two hundred or so titles in these collections were scanned at some thirty different libraries in France and abroad, among them a dozen French municipal libraries.
The two primary-source collections demonstrated some of the value and potential of the French Vernacular Book Project. Therefore, when Brill acquired IDC in 2006, I felt confident enough to suggest to Andrew that he publish the print edition of the French Vernacular Book Project with Brill, even though at that point I had no experience whatsoever with book publishing. Until then Andrew had considered publishing this major reference work with the University of St Andrews Press, which he intended to resurrect for this purpose. He told me – was it bluff? – that thanks to regular rounds of golf with the publishing chief of Cambridge University Press he knew exactly what it would entail, and even knew, quite accurately as it turned out, the costs for the paper needed. Still, the prospect of invoicing customers and shipping books was daunting, and after some haggling about the contract, French Vernacular Books became the first book I published.2
Andrew’s ambition for his bibliographical project did not stop here. After French Vernacular Books, we went on to publish French Books (pre-1601 books published in France in languages other than French), Iberian Books (under the direction of Sandy Wilkinson at University College Dublin), and Netherlandish Books.3 Invoking our Anglo-Dutch feud, Andrew persuaded me that I was just the right person to proofread this last one. Rather than enjoying the beautiful spring weather, I spent my next three weekends sifting through 32,000 bibliographic entries, which in published form would translate into 1,589 pages of printed text.
Once we had agreed that Brill would publish French Vernacular Books, Andrew asked if we would also be interested in publishing a collection of his earlier essays on the sixteenth-century French book market. He would add some new essays too, so the resulting volume would provide a well-rounded overview of the topic. The book was to serve as a companion to the bibliography, underlining Andrew’s creed that the USTC staff are historians first, with the prime purpose of the bibliography being a source of data to support historical research. I liked the idea but I was not the publisher in charge of early modern studies at the time. That person was my colleague Hendrik van Leusen, so I set up a meeting between Andrew and Hendrik at the Brill office in Leiden. As it happened, Hendrik – who was passionate about book history – had recently set up a new series called The Library of the Written Word (LWW).4 Hendrik was a great admirer of Andrew’s data-driven approach to book history, and didn’t waste much time inviting him to become editor of the hand-press strand of the series. After having been reassured that it would not be awkward that the inaugural volume in the series would be his own collection of essays, Andrew accepted. Soon after, The French Book and the European Book Trade was published as LWW vol. 1.5 It remains one of the best-selling titles in the series.
Hendrik’s stroke would prove brilliant, as I was soon to discover. Hendrik left Brill in late 2008 and I became acquisitions editor for early modern studies, also inheriting The Library of the Written Word. Andrew had big plans for the series, and thanks to his tireless energy and the help of a stellar editorial board, LWW would eventually emerge as the leading series in the field.6 In early 2022, we celebrated the publication of the 100th volume in the series. By then, some 380 academics had published in Andrew’s Handpress World, ranging from household names such as Ian Maclean and Lotte Hellinga to freshly minted PhDs. The series publishes monographs, edited collections, bibliographies, translations, and reference works on topics as varied as watermarks, libraries, and the history of the news. It also publishes the volumes resulting from the annual St Andrews book history conference.7
The first time I visited St Andrews was in 2006, at Andrew’s invitation. He had arranged for a black cab to pick me up from Edinburgh Airport. Behind the wheel was Bob, Andrew’s chauffeur of choice, who during the eighty-minute drive to St Andrews would tell me countless stories in his thick Scottish accent, for instance about the time he chauffeured Barbara Broccoli, the producer of James Bond. All the while, a breath-taking landscape unfolded before our eyes. First, we crossed the Firth of Forth estuary, which offers spectacular views of the Forth Rail Bridge, an 8,000-feet red steel colossus which dwarfs the villages at its base. After a stretch of highway, we continued our journey through rolling hills covered with sheep and gorse – a yellow flower that seems ubiquitous in Scotland. Finally, the walls and towers of St Andrews emerged at the horizon, much like a townscape straight out of the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Andrew’s office is on the top floor of St John’s House, a mediaeval building close to the ruins of St Andrews cathedral. In the early years, before moving to the bigger venue of St Mary’s College across the street, this would be the location of the annual book conference. Like an itinerant salesman, I would set up the Brill bookstall in a seminar room on the first floor. Over the years, the number of yellow-and-blue books – the eye-catching albeit not universally loved LWW colour scheme – would gradually increase, until virtually the whole table would turn yellow and blue. At the end of each conference I was allowed to store unsold stock in a closet near Andrew’s office for reuse the next year – a cost-saving tactic similar to one employed by Christophe Plantin at the Frankfurt bookfair, as Andrew pointed out to me.
The St Andrews book history conference has always been a lively and inspiring affair. Typically at least one of the organisers is a PhD candidate or postdoc, who thus gets the opportunity to gain experience with organising conferences. The organisers are also to edit the conference volume, which for some yields their first book publication. This advancing of the careers of young academics is something I have come to associate with Andrew, who is always willing to share the limelight or take second place. The two LWW volumes on the birth of modern advertising, for example, are authored by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, in that order, even though Arthur is the junior scholar and according to Dutch alphabetisation his name would be filed under W (this was not lost on Andrew).8 The idea for the topic, however, originated with Arthur, who was duly given his credit.
The book conference offers its attendants a first-hand impression of how closely knit a community the USTC team is. Interns, PhD candidates and postdocs from a host of different countries all work in tandem to amass new records for the database and produce research on various aspects of the early modern book. During the conference, they mingle with senior scholars over dinner, which often extends to pints in Aikman’s pub until closing time (Andrew in his wisdom tends to skip this boozy post-dinner). Andrew always took pains to make me feel part of the team, including me in the USTC group photo or inviting me over to his house for dinner with some of the team members. A close relationship between scholar and publisher has been a recipe for a successful publishing venture ever since the invention of the printing press, and is symbolised in Brill’s logo, which depicts the union between Pallas (learning) and Hermes (trade). All of which is not to say that Andrew is above resorting to more Machiavellian methods when he believes it suits his needs. Occasionally he will pitch Brill against ProQuest, remarking how much more lavishly our competitor spends on ‘nibbles’ when hosting a reception.
One thing that has always struck me about Andrew is his keen sense of marketing. For Andrew, publishing a book does not stop the moment the author’s copies land on his doormat. Especially following the publication of a major title, Andrew will organise (or have Brill organise) a book launch or symposium in the book’s key markets – for Netherlandish Books we held a launch event at the University of Amsterdam and a symposium at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp. This would be combined with press releases, interviews and sometimes a glossy folder. Andrew’s eye for detail even extends to the Brill book table, which during a conference he will check regularly to make sure all books remain neatly lined up (and to catch up with the lonely publisher staffing it). It is this rare combination of market savviness, strong work ethics, commanding expertise, superior writing skills, decisiveness, persuasiveness, and ambition that makes Andrew so successful, both as author and as series editor.
Newburyport (MA), August 2021
Andrew Pettegree (ed.), The Huguenots (Leiden: Brill-IDC, 2008;
Andrew Pettegree, Malcolm Walsby and Alexander Wilkinson (eds.), French Vernacular Books / Livres vernaculaires français (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2007).
Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), French Books: Books Published in France before 1601 in Latin and Languages other than French (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2011). Alexander Wilkinson (ed.), Iberian Books / Libros ibéricos: Books Published in Spanish or Portuguese or on the Iberian Peninsula before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Followed by: Alexander Wilkinson and Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo (eds.), Iberian Books / Libros ibéricos: Books Published in Spain, Portugal and the New World or Elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese between 1601 and 1650 (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2015). Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Netherlandish Books: Books Published in the Low Countries and Dutch Books Printed Abroad before 1601 (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2010).
The series’ homepage can be found at
Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book Trade (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
At this point I would like to express my gratitude to my colleague Francis Knikker, who in her role as Associate Editor at Brill has worked with me on the Library of the Written Word since 2014, shepherding some sixty LWW volumes to production.
For more about the history of the series, see: Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Library of the Written Word and the Evolving Discipline of Book History’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis / Yearbook for Dutch Book History, 26 (2019), pp. 199–207.
Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, The Dutch Republic and the Birth of Modern Advertising (Leiden: Brill, 2020); Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree, News, Business and Public Information: Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–1675 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).