The Archives of the late Paul Valkema Blouw

In 2017 the complete collection of annotated photocopies, collected by Paul Blouw for his personal use during his long career as an independent scholar, will be published as a companion to his Collected Works: his Essays and his magnum opus Typographia Batava – the most important publications on printing in the Low Countries in the 16th century.

Many if not most 16th century Dutch books and pamphlets were published without the name of the printer or publisher. Blouw spent more than 30 years to trace all of them. To be able to do this – in pre-computer days – he build an archive of typographical material, almost all of them annotated. It contains more than 15.000 photocopies of pages of rare books.

Although his monumental bibliography will probably never be superseded, he loved his many articles more, about writers such as Hendrick Niclaes, Menno Simonsz and their printers.