by Willem Meiners
FOR YEARS they were my neighbors in Maryland, publishing house Wolters Kluwer from Alphen aan de Rijn. I owned a print shop behind their building where I printed a million books in those days. Sometimes I introduced myself as Lawrence Coster. My statue stands on Grote Markt in Haarlem.
Of the five largest publishing houses in the world, two are Dutch, and none are American. Wolters-Kluwer, with major locations in nine U.S. states, is No. 5. Reed-Elsevier is No. 2.
Most Americans do not realize this, because Wolters and Elsevier do not publish bestsellers like, say, Random House (German owned, at No. 4, just above Wolters). What they do do at Wolters Kluwer is send the latest industry-related news every morning at the start of the workday to a million American accounting and law firms, a million healthcare workers, and every major bank.
Elsevier, the family name of Louis Elsevir of Leiden who started his publishing company in 1583, publishes half a million medical, technical and scientific research reports in nearly three thousand different journals and magazines, and earns half its world income in the US.
Surprising? Yes, but not when you consider that the freedom of the printing press is a Dutch invention, that Amsterdam already had 400 bookstores when the rest of the world had yet to learn to read (San Francisco, with a similar population size as Amsterdam’s, has 70 of them today), that half, half! of all the books in the world were published in NL for a while – and that ‘boek’ and the English ‘book’ are one and the same word, derived from ‘beuk’, the beech tree bark from which even long before Coster, who is holding one in his hand, pieces were cut to make letters with, called staven.
Hence still the word boekstaven, a Dutch verb meaning write. That once was beukstaven.
* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman.
