How to talk like a Dutch gangster, or Recent acquisitions section updated (September 2)

Have you ever wished you could talk like a Dutch gangster? Or would you like to know the secret of how to bring forth fair and beautiful children? Then this is your lucky day, because in our online inventory you can now find books that will teach you all you want to know! Click here to go directly to the Recent acquisitions section of our website.

As you can imagine, a Dutch villain would never call a book a book. Instead he would say ‘babbelaar’. If he was particularly vicious he would not just shoot someone, but ‘brandt’ him ‘kapot’ with his ‘kraker’. Then he would no doubt take all of his victim’s ‘poejer’ and spend it on a ‘kat’ in a ‘motkasie’ or on a ‘klankert met vonk’ in a ‘kit’. If you have no idea what this villain – having done all this – is guilty of, we recommend buying our copy of Cartouche, of de Gestrafte Booswigt. To this Dutch translation of Cartouche, ou le vice puni, poëme, is added a very interesting dictionary of ‘Bargoens’, as the Dutch thieves language is called.
According to the standard Dutch dictionary, the word Bargoens is probably derived from the French ‘baragouin’, which means something like ‘incomprehensible language’. In turn, this French word is supposed to be a combination of the words ‘bara’ and ‘gwin’, which was what Breton soldiers shouted when they entered an inn and wanted bread and wine. Click here to find out more about Cartouche and Bargoens!

Of course, no mother would want a Cartouche for a son. In fact, which parent is not anxious to find a method of bringing forth children that are guaranteed both fair and beautiful? This is how they did it in the sixteenth century: “place in the bed-chambers of great men, the images of Cupid, Adonis, and Ganymedes or else to set them there in carved and graven works, in some solid matter, that they may always have them in their eyes. Whereby it may to pass, that whenever their wives lie with them, still they may think upon those pictures, and have their imagination strongly and earnestly bent thereupon. And not only while they are in the act, but after they have conceived and quickened also. So that when the child is born, imitate and express the same form which his mother conceived in her mind, when she conceived him, and bare in her mind, while she bare him in her womb.”
Truth be told, we have not yet experimented with this method ourselves, so we dare not vouch for it, but in the second book of his Magiae naturalis Giambattista della Porta (ca. 1540-1615) explicitly states “I know by experience that this course will take good effect.” In our online inventory you can now find an interesting Plantin edition of this extremely influential work!

Also in our Recent acquisitions section is a beautiful copy of Theatrum Universale Omnium Animalium Piscium, Avium, Quadrupedum, Exanguium, Aquaticorum, Insectorum, et Angium, CCLX by John Jonston (1603-1675). The first edition of this splendidly illustrated classic on zoology appeared in Frankfurt in 1650. In 1663 the VOC presented a copy of the work to the Shogun Yoshimune in Decima, and it subsequently became the main source for the study of natural history in Japan. Our edition of 1718, edited by Hendrik Ruysch, is equally famous and important, because Ruysch added a supplement on exotic fish, Collectio Nova Piscium Amboinensium, which is in fact the earliest published work on the fish in the Pacific and the East Indies. Click here for a full description of this marvellous two volume work!

Please enjoy exploring the Recent acquisitions section of our website, where you can find these and 27 other interesting items, including a very rare astronomical work by the Italian mathematician Federico Saminiati, a manuscript fortification plan of Grave, and rare edition of an interesting collection of works by Arrian.