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 Review) "[An] excellent contribution to book history."--Robert Darnton, New York Review of 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 well-informed 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.

This volume is a revised and improved edition of the auction catalogue of Kierkegaard’s private library. The catalogue has long served as one of the most valuable tools in Kierkegaard studies and has been actively used by commentators, translators and researchers for tracing the various sources of Kierkegaard’s thought. With the catalogue in hand, one can determine with some degree of probability what books he read and what editions he used for his information about specific authors. The present volume represents the fourth printing of the catalogue, and it differs from its predecessors in many respects. The previous editions contained incomplete, erroneous and inconsistent bibliographical information about the works in the catalogue. The primary goal of the present edition was to obtain all of the books and check their title pages for the precise bibliographical information. The result is an accurate and reliable edition of the catalogue that conforms to the needs of Kierkegaard studies in the digital age.