ABSTRACT
By 1660, the population and the physical space of Amsterdam, the third-largest town in Europe after London and Paris, had expanded dramatically. The city’s population had increased from some 30,000 in 1580 to around 170,000 in 1650. 1 In the early stages of growth, book production in the largest publishing centres had been dominated by just a handful of firms, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the number of publishers had increased significantly. As a result, the competitive context differed greatly from that in 1578, when Cornelis Claesz had first come to town. What did this mean for the Dutch book trade in general and Amsterdam’s in particular? And how did the organization of production, especially geographic concentration and local specialization, facilitate or hamper its development?
