INTRODUCTIONThe sixteenth-century book world was in many respects one integrated market. It mattered not to a purchaser whether a book was published in Paris or Basel, so long as they could obtain the desired title, at a price they could afford, and in a timely fashion. At an early stage in this history of print there developed a market of great efficiency and sophistication to ensure than books could be transported around Europe in this way.Yet within this European book market, each local or national market developed its own distinct particularities. Each, obviously, catered to a particular, and largely separate, vernacular trade. And each commanded a different part of the international trade, often with distinct strengths and specialisations.In this sophisticated world of print the booksellers and publishers of the Low Countries established an important role. The lands ruled by the heirs to the Burgundian inheritance, and later the kings the Spain, possessed several distinct advantages.

Flanders and Brabant were favourably placed at the northern end of one of Europe's principle arteries of trade, along the Rhine to Italy. The Low Countries were home to some of the largest and most vibrant trade communities of the late mediaeval centuries; and in the sixteenth century Antwerp would emerge as Europe's principle international trading metropolis. This highly urbanised society had a proud schools tradition, and its population was among the most literate and educated in Europe. The population, divided between a French-speaking minority in the South, and the Dutch-speaking northern provinces, also played host to a large, polyglot merchant community from all parts of Europe.All of these distinctive characteristics might have been expected to make the Low Countries particularly fertile territory for the dynamic book world that flourished after the invention of print. This was indeed the case. In the sixteenth century the printers of the Low Countries played a role in the European publishing industry out of all proportion to the size of the local population.The Bibliographical InheritanceThe importance of the Low Countries to the early history of print is not in doubt.

This makes it all the more curious that it has not until this point been possible to create a complete survey of books published in the Low Countries during this period. This is partly a consequence of the normative bibliographical tradition that separates the fifteenth century, the incunabula period, from sixteenth-century print. But it also owes much to the circumstances in which surveys of print were undertaken in the twentieth century, divided in a manner that paid more attention to modern political boundaries than to the geographical realities of the sixteenth century.The task of documenting the printing achievement of the first decades of print, the incunabula age of the fifteenth century, fell to the English bibliographer M.F.A.G. Campbell.

His Annales were published in 1874, and were thought even at the time to be unsatisfactory. Various supplements and continuations were published by M.E. Kronenberg and by Campbell himself into the twentieth century. Campbell's work, as is the case with all early surveys of incunabula, is now in effect superseded by theon-line collaborative project, the ISTC hosted in the British Library, London. This records some 2,229 books published for the Low Countries. The present survey has augmented this total with a small number of editions not yet included in the ISTC (mostly vernacular French editions discovered in French provincial collections): but the ISTC is regarded as the definitive basis for questions of dating and attribution. The ISTC records have been collated with the records of the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrücke, the august and detailed survey of early printing managed from the Staasbibliothek, Berlin, which also provides valuable additional data on formats and collations.

The work undertaken by Campbell was continued for the sixteenth century by Wouter Nijhoff and M.E. (Maria Elizabeth ) Kronenberg, who published in three parts between 1923 and 1942 a bibliography of all books published in the Low Countries between 1501 and 1540, the post-incunabula period. Based on a wide-ranging survey of collections spread throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe, Nijhoff and Kronenberg offered a meticulously scholarly and reasonably complete survey, including intelligent attributions for works with no identified printer. Inevitably a work compiled over so long a period (and in the case of the first volume, almost one hundred years ago) poses challenges to the user. The sequence of editions is arrayed in three alphabetical ranges, ordered by author, with additional lists of corrections and emendations, and other located copies. The user wishing to study early Dutch editions of Erasmus (of which there were very many) would have to search in at least eight different places to create a full list with library locations.Is a credit to the quality of the work undertaken by Nijhoff and Kronenberg and their assiduousness in searching out copies that NK remains the cornerstone of serious work on this period.

Inevitably since this time further specialist work has both added to the corpus of known works and corrected many attributions. The turmoil of the war years means that many copies are attributed to libraries that no longer exist: other copies have been bought, sold, or destroyed. Most challenging for the user is the inclusion at the beginning of volume three of a separate numerical range representing references to editions at that point known to the authors only from bibliographical references (these have been given numbers beginning with a 0, thus 0195). This supplementary range is then progressively integrated into the main sequence as references are matched to surviving copies: thus NK 4313 replaces the item listed as 0199 in the supplementary sequence. A concordance of these attributions is provided at the conclusion of volume three. Others are discounted because they fall outside the period under consideration, or because the bibliographical reference appears implausible. But this still leaves a substantial residue of items not yet matched to surviving copies which nevertheless can with a fair degree of probability be regarded as authentic. 350 items from this supplementary range have been included in this bibliography on this basis.

Since these recovered attributions are often based on contemporary manuscript sources, they can additionally provide extremely valuable information on their commissioning by institutional customers, prices and print runs.The completion of Nijhoff and Kronenberg, set alongside the survey of Dutch incunabula, left an obvious gap, compared with other bibliographical projects, for the period 1541-1600. This was the period when Low Countries typography experienced its greatest period, as well as the disruption and turbulence caused by the Dutch Revolt. A first attempt to address this lacuna was begun around fifty years ago, with a survey of books undertaken by the Royal Library in Brussels. A decision was taken at this point that, in contrast to the practice of Nijhoff and Kronenberg, the production of modern day Belgium and the Netherlands would be treated separately. In fact the first volume of what became Belgica Typographica listed only the holdings of the Royal Library in Brussels, and only those books in the collections printed within the borders of modern day Belgium (a total of 4,933 items). This foundation collection was then augmented by two further volumes, recording additional items in other Belgian libraries; these include, in volume two, the significant collections of the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, and in volume three, the holdings of the Rijksuniversiteit Gent. A fourth volume provides a chronological survey and a concordance of printers.

All told, this makes a repertory o.