WHEN WAS America founded? Answer: in the seventeenth century. Who were the founding builders? Answer: the Dutch. They named the new country New Netherland, and built a city on the coast which they christened New Amsterdam, next to towns that they called New Utrecht, New Amersfoort and Breukelen. The Dutch were world champions in those days. They were the best transporters. The best importers. The best exporters. The best seafarers. The best dam builders. The best land reclaimers. The best water managers and canal diggers. The best painters.
And while being and doing all that, they were also world champions in book printing and publishing. More than half of all the world’s books in those days were printed in Holland, the beating heart of freedom of speech worldwide. Amsterdam alone counted a hundred publishing houses and four hundred bookstores. Just as they were laying the foundations of America. This had huge consequences, up to and including today. For Holland introduced across the Atlantic a Dutch American book tradition, deeply rooted.
AMERICA KNOWS no such thing as a Book Week. It does not have a Day of the Book. But it does have Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency in California, one of the nation’s most prominent. It has Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer, two of the top five publishers in the US. America also has Stephen King whose DNA hails from Leeuwarden, and from Gelderland’s Loenen, and Robert Ludlum from Heerde, Stephenie Meyer from Wageningen, John Updike from Elburg, Walt Whitman from Velsen, Ernest Hemingway from Amsterdam, Herman Melville from Groningen, Mark Twain from Brabant, Wayne Dyer from Valkenburg, and Ann Patchett, of The Dutch House fame, is the wife of Ruurlo doctor VanDevender. The sweet man who came up with those Little Free Libraries in people’s front yard, Todd Bol, is a direct descendant of Amsterdam’s Ferdinand Bol, the famous painter.
The e-reader: yet another invention with Dutch fingerprints. Battery expert Marc Tarpenning, descendant of Gerrit Teerpenning from Bunschoten, made the first one, the Rocket. He soon sold his company for a lot of money, and then went on to invent the Tesla, later marketed by Elon Musk, a somewhat odd man with roots in Vuren, Gelderland.
AND THEN there’s the rock-solid status of America’s religious literature. Willem Eerdmans of Bolsward, his cousins Patrick and Bernard Zondervan of Franeker, Louis Kregel of Peize in Drenthe, and his cousin Herman Baker, formerly Bakker of Zoutkamp, each started a publishing company, in Michigan, and to this day they form the industry’s gold standard. Zondervan proved so successful that HarperCollins wasted no time acquiring it.
And for the record, Willem Eerdmans, together with his compadre Brent Sevensma, had only just started their publishing company when the Titanic sank. He immediately set about writing, reading whatever newspaper reports he could get his hands on, and a month after the sinking, his book De ramp van de Titanic came off the press, in Dutch. Bingo, a bestseller right away. Because people, the devout ones included, love reading about other people’s disasters.
