N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw” — the Limited Company for the Exploitation of the Monthly “Netherlands Indies, Old and New” — was the Dutch limited company (Naamloze Vennootschap, N.V.) that published the monthly periodical Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw and, as the publisher-of-record on the title-page of Prof. T. J. Bezemer’s 1933 plate-atlas *Indonesische Kunstnijverheid*, was the publishing house that issued the atlas to the Dutch colonial-educated public. The N.V. was the corporate vehicle by which the periodical was commercialised, and its publication of the Bezemer atlas was an extension of that commercial function: the atlas was a stand-alone companion volume to the periodical, issued by the same N.V. and printed by the same printer (ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., The Hague).
The N.V. as publisher-of-record
The N.V.’s role in the publication of the Bezemer atlas is recorded on the title-page. The title-page reads, in full: Indonesische Kunstnijverheid. Platen-Atlas met Inleiding van Prof. T. J. Bezemer. Uitgegeven met medewerking der Koninklijke Vereeniging “Koloniaal Instituut”, Amsterdam. N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw”. ‘s-Gravenhage: ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V. — that is, the atlas was published met medewerking der (with the co-operation of) the Koninklijke Vereeniging “Koloniaal Instituut” of Amsterdam, by the N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw”, at The Hague, by ten Hagen’s printing-and-publishing house. The title-page thus names three institutional actors — the Koloniaal Instituut (which supplied the scholarly content and the collections), the N.V. tot Exploitatie (which commercialised the publication), and ten Hagen’s Drukkerij (which printed the volume) — of which the N.V. tot Exploitatie was the actual publisher-of-record, holding the imprint and assuming the commercial risk of the publication.
Relationship to the periodical
The N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw” was, as its name declares, the corporate vehicle of the monthly periodical Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw. The periodical was a maandblad — a monthly — issued in yearly volumes (jaargang) and addressed to the Dutch colonial-educated public; the N.V. was the limited company that owned the periodical, contracted with the printer, handled the subscriptions and advertising, and — when the decision was made to publish a stand-alone companion volume — handled the publication of that volume too. The Bezemer atlas of 1933 was the most substantial stand-alone volume the N.V. published; it was, in effect, the periodical’s summa on the subject of Indonesian craft, presented in plate-atlas form rather than as a sequence of monthly articles.
The decision to publish the Bezemer atlas as a stand-alone volume rather than as a sequence of articles in the monthly periodical was, presumably, a commercial decision by the N.V.: a quarto-format plate-atlas of 245 plates, with a sixteen-page Inleiding, was too long and too dependent on full-page illustrations for a monthly periodical, and would have been more marketable as a stand-alone volume. The N.V.’s commercial calculation proved correct in the limited sense that the atlas reached the Universiteitsbibliotheek of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (accession LS 5411) and other Dutch libraries, and is now the principal printed source for the AcehWiki’s Atjeh craft entries.
Printing by ten Hagen
The N.V.’s printer for the Bezemer atlas — and, presumably, for the periodical Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw — was ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V. of The Hague. The ten Hagen firm was a Hague-based printing-and-publishing house that handled the production of the atlas — the typesetting, the printing of the plates, the binding — and its name appears on the title-page as the place-and-publisher of the volume: ‘s-Gravenhage: ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V. The division of labour between the N.V. tot Exploitatie (which commercialised the publication) and ten Hagen’s Drukkerij (which printed it) was a typical arrangement in Dutch colonial publishing: the N.V. held the imprint and the copyright, while the printing-house handled the physical production.
Significance for Atjeh
For Atjeh’s history, the N.V.’s significance is principally as the publishing-house that made the Bezemer atlas of 1933 possible. The atlas is the principal Dutch photographic record of Atjeh craft objects in the late colonial period, and its publication — under the N.V.’s imprint, with the Koloniaal Instituut’s medewerking — was the institutional act by which that photographic record entered the Dutch colonial-scholarly public sphere. Without the N.V.’s commercial decision to publish the atlas as a stand-alone volume, the photographs of the Atjeh loom (plate 62), the Atjeh imported-silk warp-ikat (plate 65), the Atjeh silk ikat with warp strokes (plate 66), and the Atjeh sirih bowl and food tray (plate 172) would not have been collected into a single published volume, and the Atjeh material in the atlas would have remained dispersed across the separate photographs and museum records of the various Dutch collections.
The N.V.’s publication of the Bezemer atlas is, in this sense, the publishing event that made the AcehWiki’s cluster of Atjeh craft entries possible. The atlas is the single source to which all the Atjeh-plate entries in this cluster refer; the N.V. is the publisher-of-record that issued the atlas; and the N.V.’s commercial calculation — that there was a Dutch colonial-educated public for a quarto-format plate-atlas of Indonesian craft — is the institutional condition of the atlas’s existence.
See Also
- Indonesische Kunstnijverheid (Bezemer 1933)
- Nederlandsch-Indië, Oud en Nieuw
- Koninklijke Vereeniging “Koloniaal Instituut”
- T. J. Bezemer
- Atjeh weefgetouw (Bezemer plate 62)
- Atjeh imported silk warp ikat (Bezemer plate 65)
- Atjeh silk ikat warp strokes (Bezemer plate 66)
- Atjeh sirih-schotel en etensblad (Bezemer plate 172)
- Noord-Sumatra standing brass lamps (Bezemer plate 174)
- 1933
Source
Indonesische Kunstnijverheid. Platen-Atlas met Inleiding van Prof. T. J. Bezemer (publisher’s imprint: N.V. tot Exploitatie van het Maandblad “Nederl-Indië, Oud en Nieuw”, ‘s-Gravenhage; printer: ten Hagen’s Drukkerij en Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V., 15 October 1933). Title-page and printer’s imprint. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, LS 5411.