5

MOUTON GETS STARTED

the sole editor. Van Schooneveld took his inspiration in his choice of tide from the Netherlandic series Zwolse drukken en herdrukken of the Tjeenk Willink publishing house that had been established in 1953. Van Schooneveld’s series, recognizable by the blue covers, published works in the field of Slavic lin guistics and literature. From the very beginning tides were published that would become the standard texts in the field in Western universities: the Old Church Slavonic grammarby Horace G. Lunt (Vol. 3; 1955), Russian for malism by Victor Erlich (Vol. 4; 1955) and the Handwörterbuch zu den altkirchenslavischen Texten by L. Sadnik and R. Aitzetmiiller (Vol. 6; 1955) which was published in collaboration with Universitatsverlag Winter in Heidelberg. A German or French tide was an exception in this series dom inated by new English tides and Russian reprints. Van Schooneveld reserved the first volume in Slavisticprintings and reprintings for a posthumous text edition of Nicolaas van Wijk, which came out only in 1975 after a turbulent editing period. In the fifties, hardly any other publishing house in the West was publish ing anything on Slavistics on a large scale. Mouton, then, literally filled a gap in the market: a man like Jakobson could not get his books published in the United States. Considering the fact that quite a few Slavists - Van Wijk and Jakobson come immediately to mind - were also active in linguistics, this field almost automatically became established at Mouton. At that time lin guistics was just starting to come into its own at universities. This is how the series Janua linguarum, of which the first volume appeared in 1956, came into being. Van Schooneveld acted as the sole editor of this series, too. At the same time books, series, and journals in the field of Central Asian and Indo- Iranian studies began to appear under other editors. The spectrum gradu ally broadened and Mouton started to publish series in other fields, for example, French and English literature. Anthropology and sociology also received prominence in the list. Nevertheless Slavistics and linguistics remained the core of Mouton’s publishing activities under De Ridder. Later Van Schooneveld declared with regard to the start of the Janua lin guarum series: Ik had de Janua oorspronkelijk geconcipieerd als een serie van monografietjes van de omvang van een groot artikel, die te interessant waren om in een tijd schrift tussen de andere bijdragen te verdrinken en door de stroom des tijds in