'New Perspectives in Book History. Contributions from the Low Countries' is published on the occasion of the fourteenth annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in The Hague and Leiden, July 2006. SHARP is the leading international scholarly association for historians of print culture, with more than 1,200 members worldwide.

This volume comprises contributions from both young and established scholars from ten different universities in the Low Countries. Subjects range from Leuven University in the 15th-18th centuries, 17th-century pedlars and 20th-century publishing, to the application of business history theory when researching modern publishing firms.

New findings such as book lotteries and the application of new theories - such as network analysis for book history research - are described and applied in this compilation. The international position of the Netherlands is explored in articles on the relationship between Germany and the Netherlands, on scouting for translations in England, on the Elsevier Company and on translations from the French. Together these contributions form a pattern-card of book history research in the Low Countries today.