Company
DissolvedThe House of Elzevir
Leiden · 1580 – 1712
The last Elzevir printer died in 1712, and the house ended with him.
Louis Elzevir settled in Leiden in 1580 as a bookseller, near the new university. His sons became printers. For the next century the house issued classical texts, science, and politics in small formats that traveled easily and were hard for a censor to notice in a pocket.
Leiden was the right city. The university attracted authors, and the Dutch Republic tolerated more print than Paris or Rome. An Elzevir edition was not always the most accurate. It was the one a reader across Europe could actually buy.
A family firm in a new trade
The work split the way a mature print shop splits: the bookseller who judged a market, the printer who owned type, the scholar who prepared a text, the traveler who carried sheets to the Frankfurt fair. The Elzevirs were several of these people at once, which is why the name is a house and not a single pressman. Their duodecimos made the pocket classical library a commodity.
The end of the name
The last printer of the family, Abraham Elzevir, died in 1712. There was no heir who continued the business. By then Dutch printing had many houses, and the Elzevir format had been copied everywhere. The firm is the chapter's example of a scholarly publisher as a real company, with a beginning and a death, not a mood.
The work it organized
- Bookseller
- Printer
- Editor
- Fair agent
On the timeline
Related
- The Aldine PressDissolved