In this brilliant survey, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen show how Dutch bookmen conquered the European market. They also point out the importance of printed works in everyday life during the Dutch Golden Age, the long seventeenth century (ca. 1580–1700). Their aim is to demonstrate how books reshaped the whole of Dutch society.

The book is divided into four main parts, each subdivided into four chapters. Page after page, we enter into the heart of Dutch society. We discover the importance of the market for books of devotion in a relatively tolerant Republic, Blaeu's beautiful atlases, the great success of books written by famous schoolmasters, travel journals of renowned navigators, libraries of rich collectors. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen also study works that are generally neglected by traditional bibliographies, such as everyday prints for government administration (ordinances, tax forms). This business was very lucrative for official printers because it provided them with secure financial resources. The two authors demonstrate as well the importance of analyzing pamphlets for a better understanding of religious, political, and social conflicts inside the young Dutch Republic.

Amsterdam became the center of the European book trade notably thanks to a great dynasty of printers, the Elzeviers. The founder, Louis Elzevier, was the first to organize a public auction sale of books in 1599. The catalogue of this auction is the oldest catalogue known. It listed all the books collected by the Dutch stateman Marnix van Sint-Aldegonde. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen describe how, over the course of the seventeenth century, book auctions came to have a huge importance in the book market. They estimate that at least four thousand auctions took place during the seventeenth century and that four million books circulated throughout the market in this way. Dutch printers also found a new technique to protect them from bankruptcy and to sell their stock more easily. They included in the newspapers they printed advertisements announcing forthcoming books and the organization of book auctions. This innovation was due to Abraham Verhoven who inserted in his 1620 newspaper a notice advertising the content of the next issue. It did not take very long for publishers from all the cities of the Dutch Republic to recognize the value of announcing their new books in newspapers printed weekly. As the two authors point out, the Dutch bookmen developed some of the most advanced techniques for selling and marketing books.

The documentation gathered by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen is impressive: national and online bibliographies, auction catalogues, newspapers, official and private archives, academic dissertations, pamphlets, and more. Their bibliography is also impressive (twenty pages). The two authors visited numerous libraries and archives in the Netherlands and Belgium, of course, but also in many other places in Europe to trace their sources. Anyone who has worked on this type of material knows how difficult it is to collect these particulars and how difficult it is to reconstruct lost production. They paid attention not only to books and documents printed by Dutch printers, but also to works that circulated within the Dutch Republic. As a result, Pettegree and der Weduwen have documented over 350,000 separate printings, which represents around 300 million copies. These data show that the inhabitants of the Dutch Republic possessed at that time more books per capita than the occupants of any other country in Europe.

The two authors are part of a long tradition of distinguished scholars in the field of Dutch book history, such as Herman de la Fontaine Verwey, Bert van Selm, and Paul Hoftijzer. They have succeeded in proposing a great synthesis, which shows that book history cannot be neglected by anyone who wants to understand religious debates, economy, social and political conflicts, or simply everyday life during the early modern period.