After a turbulent political revolt against the military superpower of the early modern world, the tiny Dutch Republic managed to situate itself as the dominant printing and book trading power of the European market. The so-called Dutch Golden Age has long captured the attention of art historians, but for every one painting produced by the Dutch during the seventeenth century, at least 100 books were printed. In The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2019), Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen present the untold story of how a group of family-owned businesses transformed the economics of printing and selling and conquered the European communications economy. This printing revolution helped to turn their pluralistic population into a highly literate and engaged society. 

Andrew Pettegree (@APettegree) is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), and Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). 

Arthur der Weduwen (@A_der_Weduwen) is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He researches and writes on the history of the Dutch Republic, books, news, libraries and early modern politics. He is the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017), and two books on early newspaper advertising in the Netherlands (both Brill, 2020). His latest project is The Library, A Fragile History, co-written with Andrew Pettegree and published by Profile in 2021.

Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast.

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