North Holland

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North Holland Publishing Company was a Dutch science publisher based in Amsterdam that merged with Elsevier in 1970 .

The publishing house was founded in 1931 as an offshoot of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for its publications. Capital was low as the academy took over the printing costs. In 1931 MD Frank (1913–1995) joined the publishing house. He was a trained bookseller and also trained at the Academic Publishing Society in Leipzig, where he made important contacts in Paris and New York. He recognized the possibility of bookkeeping guides for small businesses after a law was passed in the Netherlands requiring the owner of such small business to take an accounting test. The guides sold well and Frank became deputy director in 1939. After the war and the occupation in 1946, he became director and visited the USA, where he renewed old contacts, including with Interscience , which in 1940 came from emigrants (M. Dekker and E. Proskauer, whom he knew from the Academic Publishing Company in Leipzig) in New York had been founded and taken over by Wiley. The English-language editions of North Holland were published by Interscience. In 1963 Frank took over the company.

The beginning after the war was made very difficult by foreign exchange restrictions. In 1949 the publishing house had four employees, in 1955 it had ten, and in 1958 its turnover exceeded 1 million guilders.

His first success with physics books they had in 1948 with nuclear forces of Léon Rosenfeld . This was followed by the founding of the journal Nuclear Physics in 1956 and Physics Letters in 1962 (their answer to the US Physical Review Letters for European scientists) and in 1967 by Chemical Physics Letters . That was in times of a great boom in physics after the war in Europe (foundation of CERN , nuclear physics and nuclear technology and their release for civil research in many countries after the Geneva Atomic Conference in 1955). Both journals became leading physics journals. Important series of manuals published (Nuclear Instruments and Methods 1957, Nuclear Materials 1959). In the field of logic and mathematics, the Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics series was established and in 1949 they published the conference reports of the 10th International Congress of Philosophy in Amsterdam and of the 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam.

The success of the Physics Letters was also based on technical advances in the 1960s (introduction of offset printing in the 1950s, electronic typewriters with different fonts in the 1960s and from the early 1970s computer typesetting). In the late 1950s, carbon copies were still often in use for the peer review process and for exchanges with the printer. As early as the 1950s, North Holland attached great importance to the quality of the typesetting (one of their math books from this time was one of the models for the TeX development by Donald Knuth ). In 1969 an independent company for typesetting activities was established.

In 1962 E. van Tongeren of Excerpta Medica was invited by Frank to expand the medical-biological publishing program. The Handbook of Clinical Neurology was published, and the European Journal of Pharmacology (1967) and FEBS Letters (1968). Other physics journals (headed by Wimmers) in the 1960s were Crystal Growth , Optics Communications , Surface Science .

The larger Elsevier Verlag, which had far-sighted entrepreneurial management under the businessman REM van den Brink and also expanded strongly internationally after the war, finally took over North Holland in 1970. At first this was a merger, but after further acquisitions (such as Excerpta Medica in 1971) by Elsevier Holding, the company name Elsevier remained in the end. North Holland became an imprint of the publisher. MD Frank retired from Elsevier in 1972.

literature

  • Einar H. Fredriksson: The dutch publishing scene: Elsevier and North Holland, in: Fredriksson: A century of scientific publishing, IOS Press 2001