As a boy I often went in search of books to Waterlooplein, which stretched out where the town hall now stands and at that time was still a real flea market. Instead of leather jackets and ‘real Dutch stroopwaffles’, scrap iron and estates were used, and sometimes there was a book in between. There were also bins with books, but books in bins were expensive, often a guilder or a guilder, and that was not the intention. It was about cheap books that you wanted anyway, and of course you hoped for a ‘find’, the first edition of Max Havelaar or Occupied City†
In general, the harvest was not easy. I once got a nice copy of Les Fleurs du mal found with nice pictures, but usually you came home with something you would never read, some of Goethe’s collected poems, in those Gothic letters, a booklet with essays by Bilderdijk, or Sara Burgerhart in an edition of the World Library that was edited by Nico van Suchtelen, the author of Quia absurdum (1906), a novel about the idealistic colony of Walden by Frederik van Eeden, a book that you came across remarkably often.
In retrospect, I think I didn’t look closely or wasn’t able to search properly, because in later years the regularly moving and constantly shrinking square often brought nice finds. A nice copy of Jiu-Jitsu from Mazure’s Dick Bos series, the tenth part if I’m not mistaken, a nice one Ping Pong Ponia by Willy Willemse and Piet Marée, and the 137th copy of verses by J.Leopold, as published in 1913 by L. & J. Brusse in Rotterdam, with ribbon marker and on a loose leaf the Rondeau ‘Le Temps a laissé son manteau’ by Charles de Orléans, translated by Leopold as ”T Getij Laat be out of the cloak’, you just have to dare!
I hardly dare to enter the Waterlooplein anymore. The whole world literature is spread out there. For one euro per part. And you and I know what’s up with Madame Bovarythe works of Chateaubriand, a pile of Woodhouse, Kees the boy† To Hell and Back and Six riddles for Parody will happen if they don’t sell fast enough. “Do you want that on your conscience?” whisper the books.
PS A few weeks ago I wrote about my copy of The Darkroom of Damocles, bought in 1958 for my 15th birthday and suddenly disappeared from the bookshelf some forty years ago after a feast of drinking, dancing and fun: “I still look at a copy of Damocles somewhere on the title page or in boy’s handwriting my name may be written.” Soon that will no longer be necessary, because the book is justified. Somehow it ended up in the bookshelf of screenwriter Hugo Heinen. I don’t know how yet, but I’m sure he’ll tell you.
Guus Luijters regularly writes about books and bookshops in Amsterdam.