How Digitizing Books Solved a Publishing Mystery

Digitization of old and rare books is a blessing. The information in books becomes accessible for everyone, everywhere, and all of the time. Digital copies of books with beautifully colored images are a joy for all and examples of digitized early modern book production increasingly proves to be a tremendous help for researchers.

The Natural History Collections of Allard Pierson of the University of Amsterdam are primarily housed at Artis Library. There you can find, among many of the published highlights of Natural History, the hand colored printed books of Maria Sibylla Merian and even a few of her original watercolors. Merian was a great artist and a sharp observer. She is considered to be the first ecologist, for she described and depicted these small animals in their living environment together with their food plant. She was famous for her work on the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly. After having published works on European insects, she went to Suriname in 1699 where she studied the indigenous insects and plants for almost two years. The result was her magnum opus Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), which she published herself in Amsterdam, where she had lived and worked since 1691.

Information about why and how Merian made the book can be found in her introduction to the reader and on the title page, where it states that the book could be purchased at Merians atelier and at the bookshop of Gerard Valk, both in Amsterdam. As Valk is mentioned on the title page, it has been assumed by almost all that Valk printed the book but I have doubts...

To identify the printer of an anonymously printed book, you can compare initials (a first decorated capital letter in a part of a book). Many printers made their own specific initials and in an analog world, comparing initials is time consuming work. The researcher needs to request books often located at different libraries, spread over the land, sometimes even abroad, and then page through all those books in the search of that special, identical initial. Work like that could take weeks, or even months.

In 2016, some 100,000 books printed before 1800 from the Library of the University of Amsterdam were digitized by Google. The digital copies were made accessible via the online catalog of the Amsterdam University Library with a link to Google Books. Once I established which printers I wanted to check, it was easy to find the digitized version of their work in Google Books. Using the thumbnail mode, I could see in one glance where the pages with the initials were. This method made it possible for me to find the printers of the texts of Merian's Amsterdam publications within a day. So we now know that Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) was printed by Hendrik Wetstein, Rupsen Der rupsen begin, voedzel en wonderbaare verandering part 1 and 2 (1712) by Gerard onder de Linden, and part 3 (1717) by Joannes Oosterwijk.

Although digitization is indeed a blessing, it cannot be stressed enough that nothing beats the original. Almost all books in libraries can be read in the reading room as books, after all, are made to be read. It has been said before that an interesting side effect of digitization is that it increases the requests for the original. People want to hold those artifacts in their hands and researchers want to check the colors and the binding, and compare different copies. Regardless, digitization still plays an important part in making history accessible.

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