3

MOUTON GETS STARTED

ment as emeritus in 1986, Van Schooneveld, who became an American cit izen, has lived continuously in Vozérier-Amancy, France, in the farmhouse that he had bought as a summer retreat in 1970. Van Schooneveld’s involvement with the scholarly publishing world started soon after his appointment in Leiden. At first the possibility of working with the publishing house E.J. Brill of Leiden was discussed. From a letter he wrote to Jakobson dated January 6, 1953, it appears that at that moment he was discussing setting up a Slavic series with Brill: ‘I wrote you already about the Slavic series for whose editorship I have been asked, and chances are very favorable for setting up a fairly large reprint series [... ] .’ 3 In the end, nothing ever materialized with Brill. Van Schooneveld did, how ever, meet Peter de Ridder, an employee of Brill with whom he would work together at Mouton for decades to come. Peter de Ridder was born on June 11, 1923 in Delft. After he graduated from junior high school (ULO) in 1937, he started to work, on a contract basis, as a clerk in the library of the Delft Technische Hogeschool. In 1942 he was drafted to work in Germany. The end of the Second World War in 1945 found him in Vienna. Finally, in the summer of 1945, he was repatri ated to the Netherlands via Odessa. In the fall of 1945, De Ridder started working as proofreader with E.J. Brill in Leiden, where he also established a Slavic antiquarian bookstore, a specialty that had not existed there. Although Brill had printed Russian language books for the German author ities during the war (to help in interrogating prisoners of war) and after the war had in fact published a few works in the field of Slavistics, the publish ing house was not really interested in a large-scale involvement with Slavistics. De Ridder and his colleague at Brill, Wim Vonk, entered into talks with Boek- en Kunstdrukkerij Mouton & Co. N.V., The Hague, in connection with the establishment of a scholarly publishing house. Mouton was a well-reput ed old printing company, as publisher famous almost exclusively for publish ing Frederik van Eeden’s novel De kleine Johannes (1887), of which a 33 rd printing appeared in 1971. De Ridder and Vonk were allowed to start work ing at Mouton after the president, Mr. Frederik Johannes Eekhout (see 111. 20), had come to the conclusion that the company should start publishing books to keep the printing enterprise afloat over the long term. Publishing was, thus, meant to be a side venture to support the main business, printing.