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Building on a recent historiographical revalorisation of the relationship between literary fiction and the materiality of the city, this article questions the value of literary narratives as a source for documenting forgotten and neglected actors and evolutions in urban and business history. The enduring role of local, small-scale and labour-intensive production by ordinary urban entrepreneurs, for instance, left few traces in the archives but received a place in literature. In the 1924 novel Lijmen (Soft Soap), Willem Elsschot, pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder (1882-1960), meticulously described the operation and equipment of forge Lauwereyssen, situated in the city centre of Brussels. Relying on various business-historical sources and rediscovered copies of the advertising magazine Revue Générale/ Continentale, where De Ridder was editor in 1912-14 and drew inspiration for the story, the article examines to what extent Lijmen confirms, nuances, complements or enriches existing knowledge about small-scale industry in the early twentieth-century city. The analysis highlights how the tangible descriptions in the story shed an unsuspected qualitative, comprehensive light on the organisation of small-scale business in the city, in particular on the logistical and financial challenges they faced to keep their activity going in the city centre at the time of burgeoning urban de-industrialisation.
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