A GREAT AND ENTHRALLING ADVENTURE

Inv. No. 11), which Van Schooneveld started, but in the end little came of this. In the meantime, Indiana University in Bloomington had bloomed into a real crossroads for Mouton interests. We have already mentioned the Publications of the Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics and the Ural and Altaic series, which were edited there. In addition to Van Schooneveld, Thomas A. Sebeok was also on the faculty of this university. He had fashioned himself a position within Mouton that was comparable to Van Schooneveld’s. Sebeok edited the Mouton series Approaches to semi otics, the publishing project Current trends in linguistics (1963-1976; 14 vols. in 21 parts) and the journal Semiotica. In reality there was of course talk of some competition between editors and series in Bloomington. The extent to which Janua linguarum and Approaches to semiotics began to overlap is evident from De Ridder’s letter dated February 20, 1969 to Van Schooneveld: ‘Tom Sebeok is sending me, for his series, Approaches to Semiotics, one linguistic manuscript after the other [...]. I would by far pre fer to have such books in the Janua Linguarum, but I see no way to bring them over (Of course, I am happy that they are with us, at all, and not with Reidel or Harper and Row or M.I.T.).’ 50 In the meantime the Slavisticprintings and reprintings series began to fall off somewhat. The explosive number of reprints (among which were many titles in the field of Russian history, i.e., outside the field of Slavistics) that were included‘in cooperation with Europe Printing Vaduz’, resulted in cancellations of standing orders. Sometimes reprints of ten or twenty volumes, or even more, fell under a single series number. Mouton had in this case overestimated its capabilities. For that matter there was known to be competition in this area: Fink Verlag (München) published many reprints in the series Slavische Propylaen: Texte inNeu- undNachdrucken (1963-1979). In Leipzig at the same time, the Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik had become very active in the Slavistics reprint market. In a letter of October 20, 1969 to Van Schooneveld De Ridder mentions ‘intekenaren [...] die ons schrijven dat zij schrikken van het aantal boeken, dat zij in 1969 van ons hebben gekregen’ [‘... subscribers [...] who are writing to us that they are frightened of the amount of books that they received from us in 1969.’] He suggests a plan for 75 to 100 volumes in 1970: Ik zou graag willen weten of jij dit te veel of te weinig of juist vindt. [... ] Als wij uitgaan van een gemiddelde verkoopprijs van $15.- per band betekent mijn

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