Miss Headstrong Projects of this kind reflected the interests of Van Oordt, originally a theologian, and of De Stoppelaar, an active member of the Mennonite Congregation. The religious persuasion of the latter even generated a small wave of Mennonitica in the publishing house, and also the Mennonite Contributions were published by Brill for many years. For that matter, books in the fields of theology and church history were occasional phenomena rather than a staple feature of the publishing house at the time. It was only after the Second World War that the monograph series in the fields of Old and New Testament studies originated, continuing themselves into the present publishing list. Whereas the former firm of E. J. Brill still presented itself as printer to the university, the public limited company dropped this time-honored epithet. The title had passed into disuse, after the theoretical monopoly on academic printing had been abolished in practice for a long time. In these years dissertations, orations, and publications by Leiden scholars were issued by various Leiden publishers, Brill on account of its tradition being no more than primus inter pares. The revival of the natural sciences at Leiden University was also reflected in Brill’s publishing list, thanks to publications by the Nobel Prize winners H. A. Lorentz and H. Kamerlingh Onnes. The “Oriental printed editions” formed the real pillars of the company, which stood firmly on the foundations that had been laid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The sixteen-volume series of De Goeje’s Annals of Al-Tabbari, begun in 1879, was completed in 1901. In the course of the 1890s, a momentous new project began to take shape: the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Together with a number of foreign Arabists, De Goeje and De Stoppelaar had set up an international committee to get the publication underway, but between the initial dream and its realization there were many practical obstacles. When the Utrecht professor M. Th. Houtsma had assumed responsibility for coordinating the international collaboration in 1899, things began to move ahead at last.5 Even so, it was not until 1908 that the first installment of articles beginning with the letter A was published. The first bound volume of the encyclopedia appeared in 1913, and the four-volume first edition would not be completed until 1936.
Illustration from W. F. R. Suringar, Musée botanique de Leide (E. J. Brill, 1897). Willem Frederik Reinier Suringar (1832-1898) was an important botanist, the director of the Botanical Gardens and the National Herbarium in Leiden. During the years 1884-85 he journeyed to the West Indies with his son Jan. He was especially interested in plants of the genus Melocactus, to which the Musée Botanique devoted a volume. In the Botanical Gardens he had a special greenhouse built for these
Around 1900 Brill had acquired a solid international reputation through its scholarly publications in Arabic Studies, Assyriology, Indology, Sinology, and related fields of study. More and more foreign authors and institutions entrusted their work to the publishing house. By tradition ethnography and biology had been important components of the publishing list, and these fields became increasingly important at the turn of the century. The results of a series of scientific expeditions to New Guinea (1903-1920) were published by Brill in sixteen volumes. In 1899-1900, the famous Siboga Expedition directed by Max Weber explored the farthest corners of the Indonesian archipelago, making innumerable discoveries and generating a series of more than one hundred and forty installments published by Brill. The company also issued the results of expeditions conducted by other nations. For instance, in 1903 the firm contracted with the Museum of Natural History in New York to publish the findings of the Jessup Expedition to Alaska and the northeast of Siberia.6
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The N.V. Bookselling and Printing Firm, Formerly E. J. Brill, 1896-1945
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cactuses, which were regularly sent to him from overseas. Later it turned out that the species so carefully distinguished by him unfortunately belonged to the same variety. The loose-leaf work contains drawings and photographs of cactuses. Photographs provided the best representation of reality, but some details could be rendered best in a drawing. ula