Share This PageBook History, Volume 10
Edited by Ezra Greenspan and Johnathan Rose
The Secrets of Success Microinventions and Bookselling in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands
Laura Cruz
Dutch innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries largely took the form of what Joel Mokyr calls microinventions, “small, incremental steps that improve, adapt, and streamline existing techniques already in use, reducing costs, improving form and function, increasing durability, and reducing energy and raw material requirements.” The key to success with such innovations, argues Mokyr, is a social and economic context that is receptive to their application. The early modern Netherlands provided just such a nurturing environment. The cluster of microinventions that characterized their Golden Age were not as celebrated as the grand macroinventions that characterized the later industrial revolutions, such as the steam engine or electricity, but collectively they catapulted the tiny republic into economic predominance in seventeenth-century Europe. The Leiden printers’ guild was the vehicle through which one such innovation, the book-sale auction catalogue, was pioneered and disseminated, facilitating Dutch dominance of one segment of the European book market.
The seventeenth century brought a host of new economic challenges to various sectors of the Dutch economy. By the middle of the century, Dutch wages were relatively high, and international prices for goods tended to weaken after the protracted period of price inflation during the long sixteenth century. This combination put pressure on Dutch industries to reduce costs and to open new markets for their goods.
The book-sale catalogue and auction, as developed by Dutch printers’ guilds, is an illustration of a response to the price squeeze. In keeping with Mokyr’s definition of microinvention, this innovation was certainly neither spectacular nor original. The Dutch certainly did not invent auctions or even book auctions. The constituent parts had been developed and used long before the seventeenth century. Auctions had been regularly practiced both in ancient Rome and in the Islamic world; the word auction itself is derived from the Latin word auctio, an increasing. There is some evidence that the Burgundian rulers in the Low Countries introduced Roman auction forms to their territories in the late Middle Ages. Though several Dutch historians have suggested that book auctions were a Dutch (i.e., northern provinces) innovation, even this has proven to be inaccurate. Researchers have recently unearthed inventories for fifteenth-century book auctions in the Flemish (i.e., southern provinces) towns of Courtrai, Mechelen, and Saint-Omer.
Nor did the Dutch invent book catalogues. Private owners’ catalogues, often used for accounting or limited distribution to interested parties, and probate inventories with books listed were both common by the Middle Ages. Libraries, universities, and monasteries might have their collections catalogued, although printed versions of these do not predate the late sixteenth century. Leiden was the first university known to have a comprehensive list of its holdings published, in 1595. Stock catalogues, or lists of the holdings of printers and booksellers, appeared nearly concurrently with the birth of printing in the fifteenth century. The Dutch did not even pioneer book-sale catalogues (inventories with prices), sometimes referred to as mart catalogues, which had been used at the great sixteenth-century international book fairs in both Frankfurt and Leipzig.
So what did the Dutch do? They streamlined a combination of these techniques, to paraphrase Mokyr’s definition, and found new commercial applications for them. Before the advent of the book-sale auction, books were usually auctioned off as just another part of a deceased person’s estate. Records show a handful of separate book auctions in sixteenth-century Antwerp and Leuven. There were very few of these, however, largely because almost no one owned enough books to warrant a sale separate from the other goods in the estate. The most famous of these early book auctions was of the library of the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, sold in Antwerp after his death in 1598. It is not surprising that the Dutch innovations came from immigrants who had lived and worked in Antwerp and may have had experience with these types of sales.
The Dutch printers’ innovation was not book catalogues, book-sale catalogues, nor book auctions but rather printing book-sale catalogues for auctioning secondhand books and using that practice to create new markets for books. The book-sale auction consisted of an agent, usually the bookseller himself, serving as the representative to the heirs of the estate of the owner of a library who would sell the books to the highest bidder. The booksellers received a percentage, usually 5 percent, of the total value of the sale. Buyers were attracted through printing a list of the books to be sold. The printed list was circulated to potential buyers who would either come personally to bid or appoint local agents to do so in their stead. The auctions took place at prescribed places and times, usually lasting several days. They were closely regulated by the guilds and by the local governments.
By the end of the sixteenth century, only professional booksellers had the expertise necessary to evaluate books, especially scholarly ones, and to find buyers for more specialized texts. Some of them may also have had experience with auctions. In the first half of the century, booksellers often sold paintings as well as books. Art auctions, under the watchful eye of an auctionmaster (veilingmeester), were held regularly in towns such as Amsterdam and Leiden well before the book auctions were in full swing. The precise relationship between these other types of auctions and book auctions is not known, but it seems reasonable to conclude that a wider acceptance and knowledge of auction practices provided a hospitable environment for the commercial expansion of the book-sale auction.
Other factors contributed to this commercial expansion. The European printing industry was well established by this time, and personal libraries were growing larger, particularly in the relatively affluent and literate provinces of the Low Countries. At the start of the century, libraries often consisted of 20 to 50 titles, but by the century’s end it was not uncommon for libraries of wealthy bibliophiles to contain 700 titles or more. In 1600, for example, Daniel van der Meulen’s library, which was auctioned in Leiden, contained 1,247 titles divided into 1,162 lots. Larger inventories further justified the advent of the separate book auction. The separation was confirmed linguistically. The Dutch word auctie came to refer specifically to book auctions while the term verkoping was used to describe the sale of any goods by auction.
There is indirect evidence of book auctions in the northern provinces beginning as early as 1584, but Louis Elsevier, a Leiden bookseller from Leuven who had worked for some time in Antwerp, received the first official permission to auction books in 1596. He first exercised this privilege in 1599, when he auctioned off the library of Philips van Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, a noble refugee, political theorist, and Calvinist theologian from the southern Low Countries. The catalogue of this sale is the oldest to survive, and a large literature has arisen concerning its contents. In addition to the Marnix catalogue, the leading scholar of Dutch book-sale catalogues, Bert van Selm, has uncovered thirty-one auction catalogues that were printed before 1611. Of these, six were held by unknown auctioneers and twelve (39 percent) by Louis Elsevier. The majority of the catalogues were printed by an Englishman, Thomas Basson, who was renting a house in Leiden from none other than Louis Elsevier. Only three of the thirty-one catalogues were printed outside of Leiden, and only six auctions were held in other cities. J. C. Gruys has suggested that the survival rate of catalogues was approximately 20 percent, so it is likely that at least one hundred auctions were held.
After its beginnings in Leiden and with Louis Elsevier, the book-sale auction was rapidly emulated in other cities and countries. First, other towns in Holland and surrounding provinces adopted it, then it spread to England and Germany by the late seventeenth century and to France by the early eighteenth. Local markets rarely provided a sufficient customer base for book printers. Therefore, only with frequent contact with other regions and countries could they hope to find enough wealthy and learned buyers to hold these auctions. The book-sale auction would have been attractive to areas with a lively printing-and-bookselling trade to provide expertise, with customers with enough cash (as well as desire) to purchase books, and with access to enough private libraries to permit regular sales. In order for the book-sale auction (and catalogue) to flourish as more than an isolated phenomenon, however, these qualities would have to be sustained over time. Did the Dutch town of Leiden provide a more congenial environment than other places?
At first glance, Leiden would appear to be a poor candidate. It was neither a coastal city nor large commercial center like Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Rather, it was an industrial town, and the majority of its inhabitants worked in the textile industry. Literacy rates lagged behind the other cities in the area, perhaps because of the large number of semi- or unskilled workers. In Ad van der Woude’s demographic study, the illiteracy rates of Leidenaars were the highest of all the towns in Holland beginning in the sixteenth century and extending to the nineteenth. Even the elites in Leiden had small libraries, with the average consisting of only a few hundred titles as late as the eighteenth century.
The lack of a sufficient number of dead, wealthy bibliophiles was an obstacle that Leidenaars learned to overcome. Libraries could be shipped in from other places. For example, the library of Daniel de Dieu, a preacher residing in Middelburg, was brought to Leiden and auctioned off in 1607. Shipment involved cost, risk, and delay, but dealers risked this nonetheless to gain access to the best markets. In Leiden, large and/or profitable libraries from elsewhere were regularly auctioned, and efforts to restrict the practice were resisted by the booksellers and most especially by the university. The only limitation faced by Leiden booksellers was a ban on auctioning books from their own stocks, but there is evidence that even this obstacle could be circumvented.
Other obstacles to the successful commercial development of book auctions were more significant. By the early seventeenth century, Leiden had the third highest number of printer/booksellers in the republic, lagging behind Rotterdam and Amsterdam. There is evidence, though, that the size of the bookselling industry in a given town is not a sufficient gauge of its receptiveness to the new technique. Amsterdam had the largest number of booksellers, for example, but there the practice was adopted later than in Leiden, Middelburg, or Franeker. The success of book-sale auctions depended on more than simply a preponderance of knowledgeable practitioners. It is not surprising to find the three university towns—Leiden (university founded 1575), Franeker (founded 1585), and Utrecht (founded 1636)—on this list. Universities were presumably a good source for secondhand scholarly libraries, and students and professors were likely target buyers. Towns such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, as centers of commerce, had access to the libraries of wealthy merchants and immigrants. The Hague, as the seat of government and the court, would also have its share of large libraries.
At first glance, the early adoption in Middelburg may seem puzzling, particularly since it did not go on to become a center for international publishing. In the seventeenth century, though, it exploited a special situation. In the late middle ages, Middelburg was a major entrepot, especially for the trade with the southern Netherlands. This role was enhanced by the closing of the Scheldt in 1584, which ended the predominance of Antwerp and shifted trade toward Middelburg, especially the port of Vlissingen. With the active trade with cities such as Antwerp and Brugge, Middelburg’s printer/booksellers were in a position to profit from incoming immigrants—especially wealthy and cosmopolitan merchants—as both buyers and suppliers. And booksellers as well—the new booksellers’ guild, founded in 1590, consisted solely of immigrants from the southern Netherlands. One of the first book auctions held there was that of Anthonio Taymont, a Flemish politician, whose library was sold in 1606. Unfortunately, in 1609 the Twelve Years’ Truce (which allowed merchants in the southern provinces to trade freely) devastated the commerce of the entire province of Zeeland and especially Middelburg. Although the province’s fortunes would revive again in the middle of the century, the vicissitudes of the Zeeland economy were not conducive to regular trade in secondhand books.
What is also interesting, if not totally surprising, is the absence of eastern cities from Table 1. Zwolle, Kampen, and Deventer were centers of trade in the Middle Ages and had many commercial ties to the cities of the Hanseatic League. However, even though many of the right ingredients were present, none of the cities in the provinces of Gelderland, Overijssel, or the Generality lands were known to have held such auctions. Why not?
Though the eastern towns were not without international contacts, there is no evidence to suggest that the eastern half of the republic participated in the international book markets to the same degree as the west. In the fair catalogues from Frankfurt from 1630–39, the Amsterdam booksellers alone represent 58 percent of the total titles from the United Provinces, which had more titles than any other foreign country at the fair. The limited scope of printing in the east meant that the industry was also much smaller. In the seventeenth century, fewer printer/booksellers resided in the entire province of Overijssel than in the small town of Delft.
Other preconditions for success in the book trade were lacking in the east. A. M van der Woude, using signatures at marriage as an indicator, estimated the illiteracy rate for males in Overijssel to have been 27.1 percent as late as 1813. Even if the absolute numbers are taken with a grain of salt, the contrast to North Holland (at 17.8 percent) is striking. Studies of book ownership in the Dutch republic are scattered, but a recent study of book ownership in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Zwolle concluded that approximately 90 percent of the households there contained no books. It would seem that the Eastern provinces provided an inauspicious environment for the diffusion of the book auction.
What was the social and economic context of Leiden that proved to be so conducive to this particular microinvention? The book-sale auction catalogue flourished in Leiden for several reasons. The university, founded in 1575 by William of Orange as a gift to the city for withstanding a protracted siege, attracted the printer/booksellers in the first place, and it helped to encourage and foster new techniques for acquiring scholarly books. In the 1580s the city attracted several prominent immigrant printers, including Christopher Plantijn, who served as printers to the university. By 1600 the academy had achieved enough international renown to attract scholars and students from quite far afield. Leiden became one of the largest universities in the Protestant world: from 1626 to 1650 more than eleven thousand students matriculated there, between 41 and 52 percent of whom came from outside of the republic. The relative intellectual freedom offered by the new republic drew some of Europe’s most prominent scholars, including René Descartes, Justus Lipsius, Joseph Scaliger, and Hugo Grotius. Still, other Dutch cities had large universities. The University at Franeker, founded a few years after Leiden, never matched its international stature, and the University at Utrecht was well respected, if somewhat smaller. The University at Groningen was founded twenty-two years before the one at Utrecht and had almost the same number of students as the tiny town of Franeker. In the early seventeenth century, Groningen had a thriving number of printer/booksellers (ten), comparable to Utrecht and The Hague.
The international orientation of Leiden in general had much to do with geography. Unlike Middleburg or Groningen, Leiden was located in the relatively secure province of Holland. It was not far from other printing centers in the republic and enjoyed the advantages of a commercial empire centered in nearby Amsterdam. The city was also in a good position to trade with continental Europe because of its access to an extensive infrastructure of canals and lakes. All of these natural advantages, though, would have not amounted to much if the city had not also made use of an infrastructure that was very conducive to commerce. By the late sixteenth century, the cities of north Holland were well connected by regular barge services, which facilitated freight transport. They were also connected by an extensive postal service that operated between the towns of Holland and Zeeland as well as nearby foreign commercial centers, such as Antwerp. The booksellers were especially able to use the postal connections. The book-sale catalogues were sent by mail to potential customers in the United Provinces, Germany, the Spanish Netherlands, and France. Without these support services, the printing and bookselling industry in Leiden would have gone the way of its counterparts in the other provinces.
Leiden was not the only city in Holland with access to this infrastructure, however, so what was the real secret to its success? Bert van Selm suggests that Leiden was the site of the first secondhand book auction because in 1600 it was the only major city in the Netherlands in which the printers and booksellers were not subject to a guild. The absence of the guild, he argues, gave the booksellers enough liberty to develop the practice on their own. This is perhaps oversimplified and misleading. Louis Elsevier originally developed the catalogue sale at The Hague, and he kept a monopoly on such sales there until 1643. Although the local government (and the Sint Lukas guild) opposed his request, he received official permission to hold auctions from the government audit office (rekenkamer) of the province of Holland. He could do this because of a jurisdictional loophole. The Grote Zaal where he intended to hold the auctions was technically the property of the Court of Holland, not the town. The uniqueness of the Leiden auction, the absence of direct interference from local government officials, was more likely the result of the close relationship between booksellers such as Elsevier and powerful government and university officials. The liberty needed to innovate came from shrewd strategies, not from lack of a guild.
On the contrary, the Leiden printer/booksellers guild was integral to their successful microinvention, that is, the exploitation of the commercial possibilities of the book-sale auction. The story of the printer/booksellers’ guild in Leiden has three main players—the artisans, the town, and the university. For a time it seemed as if Leiden would never have a printers’ guild. In 1610, the vroedschap of Leiden declined a petition on the part of the artists, including printers, to form a Sint Lukas guild, stating that the decision would be delayed until there seemed to be more of a need for local regulation. Their decision may have been justified. In the early seventeenth century, printed material from Leiden was sold primarily in fiercely competitive international markets. Because of the nature of the competition and the lack of involvement in the local economy, it might have been prudent for the magistrates to leave the trade unregulated in order to combat foreign encroachment on their markets. Perhaps this was true for other artistic enterprises as well. The magistrates did not allow the printer/booksellers to officially form a guild until 1652.
This does not mean that they were entirely free of regulation. The auctioning of moveable goods was tightly regulated by the city. Van Selm cites an extensive ordinance from 1600 that covers “Pieces from the inheritance and inventory houses together with the sale of all moveable goods in the city.” Some of the stipulations specified in the ordinance did apply directly to book sales. The book auctioneers were required to get consent to hold their sales, to only hold sales at specified times and places, to present catalogues to the magistrates for inspection, and to not sell their own new books at auction. Van Selm argues that other sections of the ordinance did not apply to book sales because it stipulated that the sales had to be performed and administered by a town functionary. Leiden booksellers, unlike the booksellers in any other Dutch city, were permitted to auction the books themselves, with limited interference from the town secretary or beadle (stadsbode).
The organization of the guild was encouraged by changes in the structure of the book industry. After 1611, the number of printer/booksellers in Leiden expanded rapidly, by fifteen or more active workers in an average year, which warranted the creation of greater order among the ranks. Their industrial organization was influenced by their close geographical proximity to one another. By 1674, the vast majority of printer/booksellers had their shops in two of the city’s tax districts, Over ’t Hof and Zevenhuizen, both located just to the east of the university. Steven A. Epstein suggests that such clustering was conducive to the creation of “organizational and technological externalities.” Clé Lesger attributed the economic success of Holland as a whole to its information-intensive economy and the social formations which fostered the free exchange of ideas. By literally working so closely together, the printers could collaborate by pooling suppliers for input goods (such as paper), by generating customers for each other, and by lowering search and information costs. Booksellers had similar advantages, especially since they rarely came into conflict over local sales. Their customary collaboration was evident even in the auction catalogues themselves, which were printed by local printers for local booksellers. On the other hand, the same proximity engendered competition for books that promoted the drive to innovate and to seek out more, larger, and grander libraries from elsewhere. Routine auction holding, which benefited everyone, would not have been possible if they had not coordinated their individual efforts in order to hold auctions of sufficient quality at regular intervals.
Even before the creation of a formal guild, the printer/booksellers did not lack a corporate spirit or sense of shared agency. The printers worked on collaborative projects and acted in concert on several occasions. The local government often treated them collectively as well. For example, in 1584 the printers and booksellers of Leiden swore a common oath that they did not abet Plantijn in the printing of illicit texts, and in 1587 they swore not to print “any books large or small in any language” without the court’s consent. In a 1592 regulation, the printer/booksellers are repeatedly referred to as a nering, or organized industry.
By the early seventeenth century, there is evidence of the printer/booksellers seizing the initiative in defense of collective rights. In 1608, they petitioned the government as “Latin booksellers” for a monopoly on book auctions. In one telling passage, they suggest that the practice of allowing foreigners to sell books was ruining their industry, which hurt their families and ultimately the city itself. For this reason, those who do not live in the city, they asserted, do not belong as part of the book industry. How did these early efforts at collective action contribute to their success with book-sale auctions?
On the surface, this desire on the part of the printers to forbid “foreigners” from auctioning books in their city was to restrict ostensibly healthy competition. The act appears overtly protectionist—they want to keep foreigners out so as to keep profits to themselves and within the city. This is evident from the language, “the almighty God has charged the magistrates and rulers to shelter and protect their subjects, to champion their rights.” But there is a more positive side; protection can also refer to protection of the right to use their innovation. In the absence of patent laws and other forms of intellectual property rights, others could copy any innovation made. In the competitive market environment favored by the classical economists, the individual gains from innovation would quickly dissipate.
Without some means of prolonging the period in which monopoly gains would accrue to the innovator, there would be little incentive to innovate. To put it another way, Douglass North suggests that sustained economic growth is not possible without some means of raising the private rate of return to the inventor. Until that private rate approaches the social rate of return, the rate of technological innovation will be slow and/or haphazard. Steven Epstein suggests that in early modern Europe, guild statutes could provide the equivalent of patent protection. If guildsmen could gain even a temporary monopoly over their new techniques through guild regulations, then they would stand to profit as a group and there would be a collective incentive to innovate.
The republic did have patent laws, but not all technological and organizational changes are patentable. It would have been impossible for the Leiden booksellers to retain a monopoly on the technique of advertising for secondhand book sales. Because the nature of their business was international, an effective monopoly would have had to extend as far as their mailing lists. In the early modern period as a whole, monopolies were rarely, if ever, complete. Several recent studies have shown that there was a wide gap between prescription (in the form, for example, of formal monopoly rights) and practice (i.e., the actual exercise of those rights). The Leiden booksellers could (and did) gain a partial monopoly on the sale (by auction catalogue) of secondhand scholarly books.
They did this by establishing themselves early on as the primary marketplace for finding desired books and consequently developing large information and marketing networks across Europe. Both of these feats were accomplished through a single microinvention, the printed auction catalogue. In addition to their favorable environment and infrastructure, the catalogue gave the booksellers enough of an edge to nudge out their competitors and to establish Leiden as the European center for such the sale of academic books until the eighteenth century.
Because they were among the first to offer such auctions and the first to send catalogues abroad advertising them, Leiden dealers had a head start on publicity. In the early years, libraries were shipped to Leiden to be auctioned because that was the only place where the technique was known. Before the technique began to catch on elsewhere, the Leiden booksellers sought to establish their dominance over the market. One way in which they accomplished this was through the sales of spectacular libraries from the University of Leiden. As mentioned previously, the university was one of the leading centers of European scholarship in the seventeenth century, and the books printed there and kept there were highly sought after across Europe. The auctions of libraries of such well-known professors as Josephus Justus Scaliger (auctioned in 1609) and Bonaventura Vulcanius (auctioned in 1610 and 1615) helped to establish Leiden as the cynosure for high quality secondhand books. The early auctions also contained rare and unique books and included works in Spanish, French, Latin, German, Italian, and even Chinese. The desirability of the books was enhanced by their sheer number. Even the auctions of the collections of nonscholars, like the merchant Daniel van Meulen, ran into thousands of titles. The exact number of titles is difficult to ascertain since these early catalogues were divided into numbered lots but did not provide numbers for individual texts. Even so, the average number of lots was over eleven hundred.
The university also helped to reinforce this early advantage by providing a network of contacts. Rather than sending out catalogues randomly, the Leiden bookseller targeted members of the university, who would pass the word along to their colleagues in other countries. In 1586, Louis Elsevier assumed the duties of pedel, or beadle, of the university and was expected to serve as “usher, doorkeeper, messenger and something of a secretary” for the entire establishment. He was well placed to avail himself of his university contacts and he certainly did so. The university scholars, students and professors alike, were the initial conduit through which word spread about what books would be offered for sale, and they acted as de facto agents for absentee book buyers.
In addition to their information networks and prestigious sales, the Leiden booksellers also gained experience in running this particular type of auction. Pricing and finding buyers for such a wide range of often esoteric texts was not something just any bookseller could do. For these sales, a reputation for expertise and good contacts was paramount. When the heirs of an estate wished to sell a library, they naturally would be disposed to choose an agent who had had success and profit in previous sales. In 1650, the widow of a minister in Brabant specifically requested that her late husband’s books be auctioned in Leiden because she believed that the sellers there could get the most return for them. Experience built upon experience, and what might have been only a slight advantage at the onset became a substantial one as time elapsed and only the organization of the guild ensured that the Leiden booksellers would continue to reap the benefits of their microinvention.
The high profile of the early book-sale auctions placed the printer/booksellers of Leiden at a crossroads. How could they effectively sustain and capitalize on these initial successes? The foundation of a guild as an advocacy group for their interests seemed to be the answer. When auctions were being performed by a handful of important booksellers, those booksellers could presumably work out most regulations amongst themselves. Especially since the early auctioneers were closely allied with the university and the city, they could easily keep in mind the interests of all parties. Once the technique spread to include many practitioners who were not closely allied with the university and some who did not even have large shops in the town, the informal relationships were no longer sufficient. In 1636, the town government approved the creation of a guild. In 1639, three of the largest booksellers (Bonaventura Elsevier, Frans Hackius, and Frans de Heger) got together and produced a further refinement of the rules for auctioning books. They decided to call themselves opzienders, or overseers of the auction. From there on out, the officers of the guild were always referred to as opzienders and not as hoofdmannen, the more traditional guild term.
Despite the existence of this charter, there is no evidence of guild activity until 1651, when the guild records begin with an account book, membership list, and a book of official documents. The reason for the delay may lie with the reaction of the university and the magistrates to the original request and the tricky position of the book-sale auction. The original booksellers’ petition was amended to reflect the demands of all parties. In addition to the stipulations of the original guild charter, the university board insisted on the right to a copy of all catalogues prior to sale. They also required that all auctions be held at time periods approved by them and conducive to academic schedules. To add insult to injury, the city slapped a tax on the profits.
Besides these (probably expected) restrictions, the printer/booksellers were thwarted on another front. They had asked that auctions be limited to the libraries of deceased people from Leiden and its immediate surroundings. The request was not exceptional—Amsterdam had had such an ordinance since 1630, and there were similar statutes elsewhere. At first glance, this would not seem to be immediately in the best interests of the booksellers. There was profit to be gained from holding auctions. Why try to limit their own earnings?
The answer lies in the stratified nature of the book trade. One possible explanation is that their request might reflect the conservative, corporate outlook of the smaller booksellers concerned primarily with local markets. They chose the path that would benefit the industry as a whole and not themselves individually. Allowing auctions from outside would privilege those merchants with international connections, firms that were already large. An increase in auctions would drive down the price of books and local booksellers, selling in shops, would see their profits reduced. At the same time, the large firms would be gaining more profit from the auctions and could use this financial leverage to gain control over the local markets. On the petition requesting limitations on auctions, the signatures of the three largest firms are conspicuously absent.
On later petitions, however, several large firms did support the restriction. This seemingly self-damaging request could reflect the outlook of a merchant whose thoughts were occupied with reciprocity. Other towns were passing regulations that forbade Leiden booksellers to do business there, since the native booksellers believed them to be stealing business that was rightfully theirs. To the minds of these dealers, it was only fair that the booksellers in a particular town be allowed to auction the books from that town. The Leiden book merchants relied on their connections in other cities to keep them supplied with a variety of texts and to keep them abreast of new developments. They might have decided that a restriction on auction sales, which were secondary to their main business, was a small price to pay in order to retain these larger benefits. There were most likely members of the guild who felt both ways.
In this case, the university disallowed the restriction. The firms benefited too much from having a ready market for secondhand books so close at hand. They complied in spirit, suggesting that it was wrong to auction books from outside the city, but they made an exception for any good scholarly libraries. The definition was so broad that the restriction was practically unenforceable. In 1669, it was officially lifted altogether. By denying this basic demand, the university board members changed the nature of the proposed organization. This was not the last time that the booksellers and the university would clash over the issue, although later attempts by the booksellers to limit sales were consistently denied. The only other major privilege the guild requested, the banning of foreigners from leading auctions, was already being enforced in the city following the Latin booksellers request in 1608.
The decision not to confine the auctions to local libraries was a fateful one. Because of its early lead, Leiden continued to attract books from other places. In retaliation, guilds in other towns secured regulations that prohibited the auctioning of local libraries in foreign cities, that is, the importing and exporting of such book collections. Such regulations were passed in The Hague in 1646, and in Utrecht and Amsterdam in 1663. Since the guilds had little influence outside of the respective towns, however, the regulations proved unenforceable, and libraries and books from these cities crop up routinely in the Leiden auction catalogues, further evidence of the dominance of Leiden in this trade is the absence of such regulations. In all of the articles, ordinances, protests, and other documents left by the guild, there is nothing to suggest that libraries of deceased Leidenaars had to be auctioned there.
Almost despite themselves, the Leiden booksellers got busier and busier with auctions. The exact number of auctions held is unknown, but there is indirect evidence of a significant increase from 1611 to 1650. In addition to the statutes in other towns directed against Leiden auctions, auctions were mentioned more frequently in university and other correspondence, the regulation of auctions increasingly preoccupied the town government and the university board, and the number of booksellers who performed auctions was rising rapidly.
By 1651, the booksellers revived and revised the original charter. The initial charter dealt exclusively with auctions while that of 1651 included provisions for achieving mastership, hiring apprentices, attending funerals, and the like—in other words, the customary rules for the everyday functioning of a guild. From the outset, the primary responsibility of the guild lay with the auctions. Over 80 percent of the statutes recorded in the Missieven book deal with the regulation of auctions. By the late seventeenth century, the bulk of the guilds’ income came from auction fees and not from member dues or other payments. Because of this intensive involvement, the guild played an integral role in the expansion of the book-sale auction in Leiden and maintaining their predominance in the face of fierce competition.
Writing in 1659, Leiden businessman Pieter de la Court blamed the guilds for Leiden’s failure to capture the mantle of international publishing, but Leiden’s position was weakening long before the guild was established. The guild charter also did very little to restrict printing, publishing, or selling new books. Throughout the seventeenth century the number of printers in Leiden declined, and those that did survive were often associated with the university. Amsterdam was easily able to dominate Leiden (and Europe) in book printing and publishing. The commercial expertise of Amsterdammers could not be matched by the Leiden printer/booksellers collectively, although there were usually a handful of large entrepreneurs who vied with Amsterdam firms for international business—for example, Jacques Du Vivie (active 1681–1727), Johannes van der Linden (active 1679–1707), Pieter van der Aa (active 1682–1729), and Jordaan Luchtmans (active 1684–1708). All four of these men, and indeed most of the opzienders throughout the second half of the century, participated regularly in auctions and gained no small amount of profit from them. They supported a guild because it would allow them to regulate sales by auction and to keep meddling foreigners, like the Amsterdammers, from horning in on their profits. They wanted a guild to defend the reputation that they had built for secondhand book auctions across Europe.
The interests of these movers and shakers often conflicted with the printer/booksellers who were more concerned with local markets. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the local boys were losing business as well. De la Court suggested that auctions lured students away from the local trade by offering new, old, and rare books at lower prices, thus putting downward pressure on the prices of new books in bookshops. Students (he contended) would accumulate debts through the auctions, fail to pay these off, and force booksellers into bankruptcy.
Whether this actually happened is not clear. Not enough is known about prices to say whether they were higher or lower, though there is anecdotal evidence of both. The auctions certainly did tempt the buyer by offering books that could not always be had at a regular shop. Booksellers certainly did declare bankruptcy and their wares were auctioned off, but this did not occur any more frequently in Leiden than it did elsewhere. On the contrary, there is evidence that the booksellers used the profits from auctions to supplement falling incomes and to stave off bankruptcy. Their troubles were more likely not with the auctions per se, but with the increasing competition from their colleagues. After all, the increase in the number of auctions after the mid-seventeenth century came mostly at the hands of the “middling sort” of booksellers. It then became in their interest to support regulations for the auctions as well.
Why was there a need to oversee auctions? One of the most common infractions of the rules was the selling of new books—out of a booksellers’ personal stock—at auction. The Leiden booksellers complained about this as early as the 1608 protest, when they suggested that foreign companies came into Leiden and sold new books by auction because they often got higher prices for them. Higher prices meant less money for books offered by Leiden booksellers in the appropriate venue—the shop. The university supported the protest, citing the potential damage to the university’s reputation if books were too expensive and students increasingly debt-ridden. To prevent this, the town enacted statutes that required the booksellers to state the name of the owner of the books in the catalogue, to auction only the books of dead or divorced scholars, and to sell only one person’s books per auction. The repetition and refinement of these rules (ordinances of 1636, 1639, 1651, 1666, 1685, 1711, and so forth) suggests that preventing booksellers from selling their own books was difficult but a major responsibility of the guild.
The guild also pushed through laws regulating who could hold auctions. The university tried to allow foreigners to sell books in Leiden, thereby increasing the number of books available, but on this issue the booksellers triumphed. Foreigners could sell books in Leiden under certain circumstances, but they could not auction them. Collectively, printer/booksellers successfully resisted pressure to establish an official auction master who would auction books in place of the individual booksellers. Both the university and the town supported the establishment of such an office to cut down on the number of abuses such as selling from stock, using false names, and distributing censored material. They were not the only parties interested in the office. Three individual booksellers had, in fact, filed petitions to become auction masters. All three were denied.
A petition (recorded in the guild records in 1687) written by the opzienders, Pieter van der Meersche, Jacob Manneke, and Daniel van Gaesbeek, spelled out the advantages of leaving auctioneering in the hands of the experts and, consequently, the competitive market. A single auction master, the petition argued, would subject the practice of auction-holding to abuse. He could jack up prices, sell books of poor quality, and engage in other practices that would bring dishonor onto the town’s international reputation for book auctions. Prestigious customers such as professors, preachers, lawyers, and doctors would stop coming to the town because of the deceitful trade (bedriegelijcken handle), and heirs would be ashamed to have their ancestors’ libraries auctioned there because of the association with defective or neglected books (defeckte of verslonste boecken). In short, the guild made it clear that the book trade should be left in the hands of those who recognized the importance of maintaining their reputation.
The guild countered the original request for an auction master by suggesting that the opzienders review each catalogue for irregularities, a service for which the auction holder had to pay a fee to the guild. This would crack down on problems with violations of censorship laws and with the use of fictional names, which the town authorities had had problems doing. It would also relieve the town of the burden of enforcement. Additionally, auction holders would have to swear an oath to adhere to accepted practices including specifying the owner of the books, not auctioning their own stock or others, and selling only the books listed in the approved catalogues. This compromise was accepted.
By leaving auctioneering in the hands of individual booksellers, the guild ensured that the profits, derived from Louis Elsevier’s original microinvention, would continue to accrue to any of their members wishing to hold an auction. Unlike in other cities in Holland and most of Europe, neither the town nor the university exercised direct control over the sale of books by auction. The frequency of auctions was determined by the profit motive of Leiden booksellers. Because of the university’s influence (and somewhat despite themselves) they could auction scholarly books from just about anywhere, and so the success of the auctions depended on their commercial and marketing expertise. This unique combination of factors was the secret of Leiden’s success with the sale of secondhand scholarly books.
How much did the individual booksellers share in that success? Both the international publisher/bookseller/printers and the local book merchants entered the guild in order to safeguard their profits. The one source of profit that they shared was the 5 percent (sometimes more) commission from auction sales. How much of an impact did the sales by auction have on their income? Initially, auctioneers were required to pay a percentage of their profits for each auction to the guild. These payments were recorded in the guilds’ account books and some estimates can be made about profits and book values (Table 3). It should be emphasized that all of these numbers are estimates—the exact method for determining the payment is unknown, and there was some variance from year to year in collection and recording.
The profitability of auctions varied with the quality and quantity of books sold. In 1669, for example, Cornelius Hackius sold the library of Professor Golius, a scholar of eastern languages. The sale contained 5,710 titles in over eight languages. For this, Hackius probably grossed at least 500 guilders. With two such auctions per year, a bookseller could earn more than double the wages of an average tradesman, (approximately 400 guilders per year), and one-half or more of the base salary of a professor at the academy (as high as 2,000 guilders per year). Not all sales were this profitable. Between 1654 and 1674, only four auctions were valued over 10,000 guilders. The average auction was valued at approximately 3,000 guilders, a net of 150 guilders for the bookseller.
Holding an auction was not without its costs. In the 1662 auction of the books of Hugo Goodyear, a Reformed minister in Leiden, the combined cost of printing and holding the auction was 125 guilders, a not insubstantial sum. There were also minor expenses that could accrue, including paying a drummer or set-up crews, though in art auctions these expenses were deducted from the gross profits. Very few booksellers auctioned libraries worth less than 1,500 guilders, a potential gross profit of 75 guilders. It may also be possible that smaller auctions were not recorded in the guild records, either because the auctioneers were not members or because the guild did not concern itself with regulation of smaller sales. The number of desirable libraries was limited and the number of booksellers willing and eager to auction was growing. For most, auctions could be used to supplement other income, not to replace it.
The number of auctions might simply correlate with the number of deceased scholars and thus vary with disease activity and weather patterns. However, auctioning proved to be very sensitive to commercial trends in the larger Dutch economy, as was the printing industry in general (Table 5). Generally, when times got tough, the tough resorted to auctions. The worsening of conditions in the regular book trade made the effort and expense of holding an auction more worthwhile and the number of auctions often rose during periods of recession. This did not hold true during the more serious depression that began in the 1670s. The French embargoes pushed up the cost of paper, hurting book production, and closed off important markets for new and used books, limiting auction sales. Thereafter, the number of auctions held never rose to the heights reached at mid-century, nor did they sink to the lows reached early in the last quarter, although the ratio of auctions to booksellers remained constant due to a reduction in the number of active booksellers.
The guild changed the way that it received and recorded payments for auction holding after the early 1670s, making it impossible to estimate profits from the guild records. There is indirect evidence, however, to support the claim that auctioneering was still a lucrative part-time job. By the later part of the seventeenth century, the profits from auction holding were enticing enough to attract the largest booksellers in Leiden, such as Pieter van der Maersche and Aernout Doude, but also for others with less international standing, such as Johannes van der Brugge and Jacob Voorn. The democratization of auction holding continued, especially after the Dutch economy stagnated in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The largest dealers still held sway and tended to make the largest profits per sale but the “middling sort” maintained profits by holding more auctions. Some veteran auctioneers would pay fees to the guild for as many as six sales in a single month, though many of these sales were quite small and did not produce catalogues. Over the course of his lifetime, Johannes du Vivie held over 140 auctions.
A few merchants made their livings primarily through auctioneering. Dirk Dircksz pioneered the practice in the middle of the century, and by the late seventeenth century Frederik Haaring and Johannes du Vivie, both respected publishers, were intensive auctioneers, holding as many as twelve in a single year. Although it is not possible to calculate their profits, both men were guild officers on numerous occasions, so they must have been influential members. They were experts on the academic book market, and their expertise and experience brought them much repeat business. In his early career, Haaring lived adjacent to the university on the Kloksteeg and then moved his shop to the corner of the Rapenburg and Nonnentsteg, next to the academy building. He printed the work of several Leiden professors. Vivie joined an informal conglomeration of booksellers who sold books by auction across Holland, and his name frequently appeared with others on the auction catalogues of his stepson, Isaac Severinus. The importance of reputation is reflected in the language used to describe auctions. The guild records began to refer to auctions by the number of requesten (requests) for their auctioneering services.
In addition to their sales of the books of deceased persons, Haaring and Vivie both participated in other auctions held in the guild room. After 1689, booksellers could hold private auctions there in order to sell their goods to other guild members. They also presided over special auctions, such as the 1694 sale of the contents of Daniel van Gaasbeeck’s shop shortly after his death. In the guild records, this type of sale was called an auctie op de kamer until the 1680s, when it was renamed a verkooping and the profits from it were referred to as a rantsoen (ration or allowance). Generally more profitable to the guild, these sales were rare in Leiden, and it was unusual to have more than three of these in any given year until well into the eighteenth century.
These types of private sales were not the specialty of Leiden printer/booksellers, and references to the practice do not appear in the guild records until relatively late. The much larger guild in Amsterdam had never seriously challenged the Leiden auctioneers for the libraries of deceased scholars, but they did dominate the market in the auctions of bookseller stocks and related items. Private book sales were performed with great frequency by the Amsterdam guild. As part of the Sint Lukas guild, the Amsterdam booksellers had long suffered from the extreme restrictions imposed on the auctioning of art. Established in 1662, their separate printer/booksellers’ guild was formed with these auctions as part and parcel of its independent existence. Because of the larger number of shops and the international orientation of so many of her booksellers, Amsterdam was the natural place to specialize in such auctions (as well as many other auction types). Likewise, Leiden, with the university in her midst, was the natural place for secondhand scholarly book auctions. This regional specialization allowed both towns to expend their energies in complementary, rather than directly competitive, activities. The Leiden booksellers’ guild successfully carved out a niche for itself in regional as well as international book markets.
The relative specialization of Leiden booksellers did not lead to technological stagnation, but rather the opposite, especially in the techniques used to distribute books and catalogues. As early as mid-century, the Leiden booksellers no longer relied simply on word of mouth or academic connections—they were supplementing their distribution of catalogues by placing newspaper advertisements for upcoming auctions. Some advertisements contained full catalogues, but for economy’s sake most only made short references to the nature of books for sale and let the potential buyer know where full catalogues might be obtained. A survey of these advertisements, from the Haarlem paper Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant, a largely Dutch-language paper sold across Europe, reflects the role Leiden played in the book trade. From 1658 to 1675, close to half of the total advertisements in the Oprechte had to do with the book trade and 15 percent of book trade advertisements specifically with book auctions. Of the 887 advertisements for new books, Leiden printers purchased only 54, or a mere 6 percent of the total. On the other hand, of the 431 advertisements for book auctions, 112 (26 percent) originated with Leiden booksellers, more than any other town except Amsterdam. Even those holding auctions in other places often provided catalogues to the Leiden booksellers, and indicated such in their advertisements. A Leiden bookseller is mentioned in well over half of the auction advertisements. In the sale of libraries of deceased scholars, Leiden reigned supreme, advertising over 90 percent of such auctions. By the eighteenth century, the booksellers of Leiden advertised extensively in such newspapers as the Oprechte, the Leydse Courant, the Amsterdamsche Courant, and the ’S Gravenhaegse Courant.
In addition to the newspaper advertisements, the booksellers continued to tinker with their innovations in order to attract as many customers as possible. The catalogues themselves became more specialized. Individual titles were numbered and grouped according to subject matter, format, and/or university faculty so that sought-after books might be easier to locate. French books were titled and labeled in French, Latin books in Latin, and so forth. Lengthier catalogues were printed that contained more information about each book, including full title, publisher, condition, and edition. The length of the entry often depended on the book’s subject matter and intended customer. For example, Van Selm points out that theological works tended to be presented in abbreviated formats while the entries for history books often went on for several lines. Title pages were added that included information about the sale, the former owner, and the bookseller. This not only satisfied the authorities but also gave the customer easy-to-find contact information. Elaborate printers’ marks were used to grab the customer’s attention, and decorative borders made the catalogues pleasing to the eye.
By the end of the seventeenth century, such catalogues were a familiar sight, and auctions continued to be important throughout the eighteenth century. Between 1725 and 1805, Leiden booksellers presided over more than 1,700 auctions. The number of auctions held per year, as recorded by the guild, was approximately twenty, with as many as forty being held in peak years. With the possibility of unofficial auctions, the actual number may be even higher. Competition was tighter, however, and booksellers selling new books began to experiment with price reductions in order to rotate stock and to compete with the auctions. New practices and regulations make this period of auctioneering difficult to compare to the seventeenth century, particularly when coupled with the severe economic misfortunes that affected the town beginning in the late seventeenth century. The remaining Leiden booksellers, however, were able to thrive. Auctions continued to bring in sizable profits, and their relative social standing throughout the remainder of the century was comfortable and stable.
With all the trappings of conservatism and corporatism that are anathema to classical economists, the printer/booksellers’ guild made small but important innovations in the way books were distributed, which consequently created a market for secondhand books where none had existed and promoted a division of labor among Dutch cities that allowed them to dominate Europe in their respective markets. Despite the initial misgivings of the individual booksellers, the guild had served to protect its collective interest by fostering trade in such books and keeping the profit in the pockets of the booksellers. Because of this, they weathered the crisis of the seventeenth century and maintained a comfortable living by working harder and smarter through the application of microinventions.
© 2007 The Penn State University