Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis - Volume 32, Issue 2025, 2025

Nippon (1832–1852) is a seven-volume, state-of-the-art book on Japan and the Far East, written by Philipp Franz von Siebold. He stayed in Japan from 1823 onwards as a doctor in service of the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (knil). There, he collected everything that could be collected. But his curiosity was too big: because of his attempt to smuggle official state maps, he was banished from Japan in 1830. He returned to the Netherlands to publish his discoveries. To that aim, he founded his own lithographic publishing house in Leiden with financial support of the Dutch government. His team was very international. The importance of Nippon only increased with the growing international pressure on Japan to open up its borders to other foreigners. With his book Nippon, Siebold established his reputation, but also the reputation of the Netherlands in the field of international knowledge of the Far East in times of big geopolitical changes.

The Richthofenkolleksje is a collection of ten manuscripts on medieval Frisian law, kept at the Frisian Historical and Literary Centre Tresoar in Leeuwarden. In 2022, the Richthofenkolleksje entered the Dutch UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The collection, created as a sub-collection by public notary and legal historian Petrus Wierdsma (1729-1811), came into the hands of legal historian Karl Freiherr von Richthofen (1811-1888) in 1858. In 1920/1921, his daughter-in-law, Margarete Freifrau von Richthofen von Webern (1861-1933), authorised family friend Professor Theodor Siebs (1862-1941), a German linguist specialised in Frisian, to offer the collection for sale. The University of Groningen was interested, but decided not to acquire it. After long and complicated negotiations and with the help of international crowdfunding, the collection ended up in Friesland in 1922/1923, where it was deposited in the Provincial Library, a predecessor of Tresoar.

This article researches the history of the Indonesian publishing house Adi Poestaka, founded in 1920 in The Hague by Noto Soeroto. Its aim is to place the publisher within the context of colonial book culture and the growth of the Indonesian community in the Netherlands. Adi Poestaka published a diverse portfolio, with literature, scientific publications, and journals with a political aim. The publishing house reflected Noto Soeroto’s ambition for harmonious cooperation between Dutch people and Indonesians, but in the end it lost its audience because of changing political relations. The article ends with the publisher’s list of Adi Poestaka, the publishing house that contributed to the colonial and postcolonial book history in a unique way.

This article introduces the new genre of the scandal spinner, a subcategory of the pamphlet in which an already existing public controversy is mapped, discussed and analyzed in detail, and thereby spun in a certain direction. Based on four examples from the 1960s and 70s Netherlands, all related to controversial humorous TV-shows, the article argues that these often cheaply produced booklets are indeed good at giving a particular ideological spin to a scandal, and thus have a part to play in the process of public opinion formation. Next to that, the booklets are also symptomatic of the key role of symbolic and cultural capital within the world of media and journalism, as they can all be linked to the networks of power that ruled this world at the time of publication.

This article traces the evolution of Chinese printing in the Netherlands from the 17th to the 20th century, from its initial appearance as pseudo-characters in European books to the 19th-century efforts to print Chinese texts accurately. It explores technological advancements alongside the contributions of scholars, missionaries, publishers, and often overlooked craftsmen and Chinese assistants. Decisions about what to print, how, and for whom were shaped by global histories, colonialism, and cross-cultural exchanges. The history of Chinese printing reflects the interplay of power, labor, and knowledge, offering a microcosm of global history where cultures met and adapted.

The Leiden University Libraries (UBL) manages unique collections, including early texts and objects from Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. These collections have expanded significantly, and the UBL has focused on digitizing them to improve accessibility. The collections include fragile manuscripts and objects from diverse materials like palm leaves and tree bark. The digitization project aims to preserve the objects, enhance metadata, and make these items globally accessible for research, ensuring that materials are available for scholars worldwide and facilitating their use in educational and academic contexts.

The Surinamica Collection at the Allard Pierson (University of Amsterdam) is a thematic collection containing numerous printed books, manuscripts, photographs, prints, maps, and archival materials. These documents often reflect a colonial perspective but also include publications that offer a counter-narrative, written by Surinamese authors. Through two examples — premodern books and maps, and twentieth-century children’s books — it is possible to explore how a postcolonial analysis of these documents provides new insights into the social and scholarly significance of this heritage collection.

This article presents The Early Modern Production of Missionary Books on Indigenous Languages in New Spain and Peru, a monography now published at Amsterdam University Press. The work deals with the production processes of missionary books written in and on Indigenous languages spoken in the former viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a book historical perspective. It studies these handwritten and printed books that were produced en masse as instruments to teach religious doctrine to local communities efficiently in their own languages. By taking into account these works as physical and social objects in their own right, it highlights how a focus on their materiality, sociality, and spatiality contributes to the interpretation of their contents.

In this review article, Alexander Statman’s A Global Enlightenment (2024) is analysed in the context of the historiography of intercultural knowledge exchange. It highlights the influence of Chinese ideas on European ideas on progress and science. It does so from a book historical angle. By researching how Chinese knowledges circulated in print, this review shows how material and commercial aspects influenced the exchange and reception of this knowledge. This places Statman’s work within the broader debate on global roots of Englightenment and emphasises the contributions of translated works and publishing strategies in the spread and interpretation of Confucius’ philosophy in Europe.