ABSTRACT
Personal libraries can be useful sources for biographies, if only because they show their owners’ fields of interest. They indicate whether these owners were committed collectors, which books they perused, and which remained unread. If a library contains all the works of Shaw, but none of Shakespeare, or only scientific publications and detectives, the biographer is in a good position to make or corroborate hypotheses about the owner’s cultural predilections. If books are full of remarks, they are a good source for intel-lectual history. Without remarks, it is difficult to know what a book meant to the possessor. Last year Jan Willem Stutje accused Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis of having been an anti-Semite. One part of his generally very weak argument was that the revolutionary had possessed some nasty anti-Semitic books. As long as we do not know why Domela Nieuwenhuis had acquired these books and what they meant to him, this part of Stutje’s accusation is without grounds. As this contribution will show, we also need to establish whether it was Domela Nieuwenhuis himself who bought these books. Is his library still intact, did he personally own all the books? This is not an irrelevant question, because the catalogue of his library contains several works published during the 1920s and 1930s, therefore, after his death. 1
