With an introduction by H.W. de Kooker.

The untold story of how the Dutch conquered the European book market and became the world’s greatest bibliophiles. The Dutch Golden Age has long been seen as the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings captured the public imagination and came to represent the marvel that was the Dutch Republic. Yet there is another, largely overlooked marvel in the Dutch world of the seventeenth century: books. In this fascinating account, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how the Dutch produced many more books than pictures and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe. Key innovations in marketing, book auctions, and newspaper advertising brought stability to a market where elsewhere publishers faced bankruptcy, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged. This book tells for the first time the remarkable story of the Dutch conquest of the European book world and shows the true extent to which these pious, prosperous, quarrelsome, and generous people were shaped by what they read. “Book history at its best.” —Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books “Compelling and impressive.” —THES (Book of the Week) “An instant classic on Dutch book history.” —BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review

This collection develops insight into the relation which Hobbes describes between his theory of government and the three-part division he draws with respect to religion. Pursuing the chain of causes that proves God's existence as first cause, Hobbes identifies and defines both "true religion" and such superstition as he found in the theology and practices of the Roman Catholic Church of his era. He then emphasizes the difference between natural religion and revealed religion in order to extinguish the claim of contemporary theologians to an authority in the state greater than that of the political sovereign. Although, according to the author, Hobbes falters in carrying out his politico/theological project, his careful, radical and innovative attempt to describe the relationship of religion and politics, church and state, has special relevance for us today, as forms of religious fundamentalism in many countries are increasingly claiming and, in some cases, winning control of political institutions.

The volume examines the proliferation of inventorying models and practices as cultural techniques of knowledge organization and production during the long nineteenth century. While inventories are still broadly treated as raw data and unprocessed source materials, the book shows how they function as complex media formats, intersecting and interfering with other material techniques to produce, store, distribute, organize and process cultural information. How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of collection, storage and retrieval such as catalogs, indexes, bibliographies, and archives; what new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ; what is at stake in the critical effort of "taking stock", whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific operations; finally, what do such operations tell us specifically about the production and circulation of knowledge in the German nineteenth century?