The Friends of the Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam have donated three very special works to the library.

Two unique editions for the Fontaine collection

The works of the French author Jean de La Fontaine were immensely popular in seventeenth-century Europe. Of course, the University Library has various contemporary Dutch editions of his Fables choisies and Contes et nouvelles. Last year, with the support of the Friends of the Library, we managed to add two unique editions to the Fontaine collection. By coincidence, these works came almost simultaneously onto the market.
The first is Fables choisies in an octavo edition, published by Daniel de la Feuille. In 1693, this Amsterdam publisher had to compete with Pierre Mortier, who had published the same work six years before and put out a reprint at the same time as De la Feuille published his edition. De la Feuille won, because he commissioned the engraver Jan van Vianen to make 200 copperplates to illustrate the Fables choisies. When the book appeared, it cost three guilders, so obviously it was a luxury edition. De la Feuille himself mentions in the preface of the sequel - the Nouvelles fables choisies - that the first four volumes had had a great success. Even so, only few copies have survived. There is one copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and one in the British Library in London. This donation by the Library Friends is the only known copy in the Netherlands.
The second donation is an edition which appeared almost a hundred years later in Paris: La Fontaine's Les amours de Psyché et de Cupidon, an adaptation of the fairy tale by Apuleius. This book is also a luxury edition, but of a different kind. It is French luxury, which somehow differs from Dutch luxury. It was quite expensive for those days, for it cost 75 livres. It is printed on large paper, has an ornamented vellum binding and gilt edges. It contains, moreover, four stipple prints which have been printed in colour à la poupée, to originals by Jean-Frédéric Schall. Stipple prints are also termed “à la manière de crayon” or “à la manière anglaise”.
In this copy a prospectus has been bound to announce another project of the printer Didot jr and the publisher Defer de Maisonneuve. The work of the French painter Schall was so popular in England that in the following year they are going to publish Milton's Paradise Lost in a bilingual edition, English and French, with twelve coloured prints after Schall's paintings.

Rare schoolbook

Last autumn an antiquarian Dutch schoolbook was auctioned in Brussels. Even though it was incomplete (among other things the title page was missing), it had the attractive annotation 'Amsterdam (?), mid-17th century (?)' in the auction catalogue. Since the University Library has a large collection of antiquarian and modern schoolbooks, it was decided the Friends would make an offer. And successfully so, for the book was acquired.

The book in question was a so-called Materi-Boecxken, oft Voorschriften, seer bequaem voor die Joncheyt, om wel te leeren Lezen, Schryven, ende een aenporringhe tot alle deuchden.  Noch een Titel-boecxken, hoemen aen eenen yegelijcken schryven sal, van wat weerdicheyt, staet oft wesen hy sy, […], with precepts for young people. That is, a 'seer profijtelijck Boecxken', or useful little book, as the title of the oldest known copy says, printed in Utrecht in 1614. These booklets, which usually have about 80 pages, are small and oblong (ca. 9 x 15 cm), had been for sale for two centuries, from 1600 onwards, with hardly any changes in the content. Printed in Leeuwarden, Deventer, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Nijmegen or Venlo, undoubtedly in  large numbers, of all these hundreds of copies so far only 14 different and partially incomplete editions have been discovered in public collections (12 unique copies and two editions in two copies). Five of these can be found in our own University Library. The books always begin with 23 (later 26) pages of edifying texts to read or to copy, opening with a large initial and running capital and lower-case alphabets along the top and bottom of the page. Then there  follow letters addressed to parents, secular or religious authorities, etc, and then lists of names of persons, states, functions, winds, months etc. Then we get all kinds of models to write contracts, bonds, receipts, bills and such like. To round it all off, there is a collection of texts printed in a large number of varying typefonts in order to learn to read or to copy.