This book offers a comprehensive history of the beginnings of newspaper
advertising in the seventeenth-century Dutch press. Dutch newspaper publishers were the first in Europe to embrace newspaper advertising and played a
fundamental role in its development. The precociousness of Dutch newspaper
publishers in pioneering this media transformation was recognised as early as
the 1860s, when the Dutch historian W.P. Sautijn Kluit wrote a series of groundbreaking articles on the history of the Dutch press. The Swedish bibliographer
Folke Dahl, who catalogued the unrivalled collection of Dutch newspapers in
the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm in the 1930s, also noted the interest of
these advertisements. Successive historians of media have highlighted the value of these short advertisements for the insights that they present into the
seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, but more often than not, as happens
with the history of advertising, they have focussed on the eclectic and the
humorous. Specialists did produce surveys of newspaper advertisements in the
fields of mapmaking and globes (P.C.J. van der Krogt) and medicine (D. Kranen),
but a contextualised history of newspaper advertising never materialised.