© Serge van Duijnhoven
Amsterdam's municipal library welcomes a million visitors a year

Amsterdam: a paradise for book-lovers


A collection of poems sold rapidly at 50000 copies. This doesn’t happen every day. And not just anywhere. Especially in the middle of the 17th century! And yet it did happen in Amsterdam, appointed World Book Capital by UNESCO this year.

Amsterdam : an open book! Dancing with your favourite poet in a library, surrounded by 5 million books!
(More)

After Madrid, Alexandria, New Delhi, Antwerp, Montreal, Turin and Bogotá, UNESCO appointed Amsterdam World Book Capital, thus acknowledging the role it played since its golden era, in the 17th century, to this date.

Events will start on 23 April this year, World Book and Copyright Day, and will last until 22 April 2009.

Serge van Duijnhoven, Dutch writer and historian living in Belgium, tells us the story of the book in Amsterdam.

Since twelve years I live, as a Dutch writer-in-residence, in the centre of Brussels. And there is much to be said for living in this multi-faceted, slightly surrealist capital of Europe. Whoever agrees with Lautréamont’s definition of beauty as “the coming together of an umbrella and a sowing machine on an operating table”, will definitely feel himself at home in this bilingual city on the vault-line of North and South, East and West.
However, I always feel a great excitement and, to a certain extent, relief, when I take the train and travel north to Amsterdam. Compared to the arid atmosphere of Brussels, as interesting as it may be, with three ugly Dutch bookstores (and one beautiful one that had to close down because of lack of sales), Amsterdam is like a paradise for book-lovers. The city on the Amstel houses all important publishers, countless bookstores, and weekly or even daily second-hand book-markets, like the ones in Oudemanhuispoort and Spui-square where in the afternoon many writers gather in the surrounding café’s.
Only recently, the jewel was put on the crown of this city with the opening of a magnificent library building boarding on the docks of the IJ and overlooking the age old city centre. The building, a sublime construction of architect Jo Coenen, offers seven floors, 25.000 meter shelve space, 28.000 square meters, comfortable foyers and study corners, exhibition spaces with books on display, a café, theatre and restaurant on the top floor. A temple of books as I have never seen before, where one immediately feels at ease and wants to stay as long as possible.

Amsterdam has a strong reputation of intellectual freedom that it tries to honour with the upcoming festivities of being World Book Capital. Ever since the end of the sixteenth century, the city was a place of refuge for free speech and the written word. In Holland, people opened themselves to the sea and to everything that came from afar, while those on the sandy soil of other provinces turned their backs on it. Tolerance was in Amsterdam not a mere principle but a practical necessity: the open merchant city, being the meeting place of all sorts of different cultures, could not allow itself to indulge in the large-scale prosecution of those adhering to different beliefs. Whilst throughout the continent books were being burnt, in Amsterdam books were being fabricated and traded.
With the fall of Antwerp in 1585 (when the King of Spain, Philip II, took possession of the city) tens of thousands of immigrants came to Amsterdam from the southern Netherlands, bringing with them their trading expertise, their capital, and their goods, as well as their appreciation of art, culture, their verve, their language and literature. It was largely by their efforts that Amsterdam’s publishing trade acquired its international reputation.
Another wave of immigrants arrived from Portugal: Sephardic Jews who had lost their livelihoods there because of the Inquisition. These laid the foundations of the tobacco trade and the diamond industry, and also made Amsterdam famous as a centre for Hebrew typography. Religious observance was not controlled by the state; there was no oppression by the Inquisition; there was freedom to marry within the community; no one was compelled to live in a ghetto; and Jews could acquire property freely. Such freedom was unheard-of elsewhere. Money, freedom and culture pushed aside the old medieval combination of “honour”, “nobility” and “heroism”. The city paradoxically grew into a realization of a medieval utopia: the safe, enclosed space in which new and old citizens alike could cast off the yoke of serfdom. “This church consecrated to God knows not enforced beliefs, nor torture, nor death,” the Jewish immigrants, full of trust, wrote above the door of their Portuguese Synagogue. They called Amsterdam the Jerusalem of the West.

The English philosopher, John Locke, wrote his Epistulae de Tolerantia in Amsterdam, among other works. The Frenchman Rene Descartes found the leisure and freedom to conduct his research, just as did his home-grown colleagues Baruch Spinoza, Hugo de Groot (Grotius) and Christiaen Huygens. The great French philosopher of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, who visited Amsterdam seven times and had his work published here, remarked that it made no difference to the Dutch whether they traded in books or in textiles, and that what was written in these books did not concern them one bit as long as they made money out of them. That aside, however, he saw the city as an inspiration, as an anticipation of the utopian spirit of the Enlightenment – or “Felix Meritis” (Happiness through Achievement) as one of the best-known art society’s in the city is still called.

Apart from the notion of freedom, books made in Holland had an excellent reputation because of the craftsmanship of the engravers, the quality of the paper (papie de Hollande!) and the fair price per copy. Moreover, the Dutch printing press was extremely inventive by creating pocketbooks for the masses (the bible by Menasseh ben Israel, the worldatlas by the Dutch cartographer Willem Jansz Blaeu who became famous with his richly illustrated world atlas in eleven editions).

During the seventeenth century, more books were been published in Amsterdam than in all other countries of Europe as a whole. Almost 30.000 people made a living in this field. In 1600 the city had 96 book shops; in 1699 the number had risen to 273. An illustrated book of poems by the Dutch poet Jacob Cats, written in 1655, immediately sold more than 50.000 copies, an amount poets nowadays can only dream of. Jews that were being prosecuted and chased around Europe, in Amsterdam were allowed to publish books in Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese and even Yiddish, to such an extent that the city became the world book capital of Jewish publications.

From atop the new library building, with its splendid view on the city, the contrast between the bustling inner city and the spaciousness of the IJ River can be best appreciated.

With a little bit of imagination, it is here between the atlases of Bleau, Mercator and Hondius exposed in glass boxes on the third floor, that one can see the endless row of shimmering masts, spires and sailboats lining up with cords along the wooden palisades that for centuries have marked the city of freedom and trade.

back to summary

Photo 2 : © Serge van Duijnhoven
A library to stay in.

Photo 3 : © Droits réservés
Engraving of a book market in Oudemanhuispoort (Amsterdam) by van H. Horst (1967).