Abraham Gronovius, Iustini Historiae Philippicae (Leiden, Luchtmans, 1760). Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, no. 836 (cropped).
Eighteenth-century Europe numbered literally hundreds of publisher-booksellers, yet only a handful of their business archives have been preserved. Among the extant archives, one of the most complete is that of the Leiden-based Luchtmans firm, that ranked among the largest publisher-booksellers in Europe, and covering the years 1683-1848. Comprising eleven meters of archival material in the Amsterdam University library, it is the most comprehensive source for the history of the Dutch book trade in the long eighteenth century. The documents in the archive shed light on various aspects of the book trade, including books published, authors with whom the firm collaborated, business correspondence, and financial transactions. The most striking material is however made up of the private client books, documenting circa 285,500 transactions (sales of a title involving Luchtmans and another identifiable private client on a given date) in the Dutch Republic, across an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 private accounts.
These private client books can be used to explore community formation among the private clients of the Luchtmans firm, in a diachronic, comparative perspective. Behind every individual client, there emerge (family) networks of readers, interpretive communities, and patterns of book acquisition. This research will demonstrate how the data on Luchtmans private clients can help us trace changes in book acquisition patterns over an extended period, viewing these within a multi-generational framework, whereby different, overlapping networks can be offset, such as households, kinship networks, and professional and religious communities.
This project is part of the main project Civic fictions. Modelling book-reader interactions in the Age of Revolution, c. 1760-1830 (P.I. Prof. dr. Alicia Montoya).