Brill Publishers

• 1. Introduction

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  Brill Academic Publishers has been operating continuously from the city of Leiden since the 17th of May 1683, when a bookseller named Jordaan Luchtmans registered with the local guild and began what would become one of the oldest publishing houses in the Netherlands. Over more than three centuries, this company outlasted wars, occupations, financial crises, and the digital revolution. What kept it alive? And how does a firm built on biblical texts and Asian languages become a global academic institution still publishing hundreds of books and journals every year? The answers reach from the canals of Leiden to the Nazi occupation, from a painful self-amputation to a fifty-million-euro acquisition.

• 2. Luchtmans and His Legacy

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  Jordaan Luchtmans was born in 1652 and died in 1708, leaving behind a business rooted in theology, biblical studies, Asian languages, and ethnography. He cultivated a close relationship with the University of Leiden, which was then a leading center for those fields of research in the Netherlands. That connection shaped the firm's identity for generations.

  The Luchtmans family held the business for more than a century and a half. It passed through several hands within the family until the last surviving heir made a revealing choice: he preferred an academic career to running an academic publishing house. By 1848, the line had run out, and the firm needed new ownership.

  What the Luchtmans family left behind was not just a catalogue but a set of capabilities. The firm had built expertise in non-Latin typesetting that few printers anywhere could match. That technical foundation would become one of the firm's most distinctive assets under its next owner.

• 3. Brill Takes the Helm

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  Evert Jan Brill was a former employee of the Luchtmans firm when he took ownership in 1848. His father, Johannes, had served as steward of the company for several decades, giving the family deep familiarity with its operations. But the inheritance came with obligations, and the new owner was forced to liquidate the entire Luchtmans book inventory through a series of auctions that stretched from 1848 to 1850.

  From that cleared ground, Brill rebuilt. He stayed largely within the core subjects the firm had always served, but in 1855 he published a volume called Het Gebed des Heeren in veertien talen, "The Lord's Prayer in Fourteen Languages". The book was as much advertisement as scholarship: it was designed to show the world that the firm could typeset Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Sanskrit, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic, among other scripts. No other publisher in the region could easily claim the same.

  The firm did occasionally venture beyond its traditional focus. In 1882, it published a two-volume Leerboek der Stoomwerktuigkunde, which translates as "Handbook of Steam Engineering" - a reminder that academic publishing and industrial knowledge were not yet completely separate worlds. But the experiments were occasional. The scholarly core held.

• 4. Wartime Complicity

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  Theunis Folkers took over the directorship of Brill in 1934, when the company's annual turnover stood at 132,000 guilders. What followed was growth unlike anything the firm had seen before, and the reason for it was deeply troubling.

  During the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, Brill cooperated with the occupying forces. The company printed foreign-language textbooks that helped German administrators govern occupied territories. It also produced military manuals, including, in the words of one account, a guide that trained German officers to distinguish the insignias of the Russian army. By 1943, the firm's turnover had reached 579,000 guilders - more than four times what it had been when Folkers arrived.

  After the war, the Dutch denazification committee investigated and found what it called "enemy money" in Brill's accounts. Folkers was arrested in September 1946 and stripped of the right to hold a managerial position. The company itself, though, negotiated its way through the process. Its fines were fixed at 57,000 guilders, and the firm emerged, as one account put it, relatively unscathed. That outcome left Brill able to continue, carrying a complicated chapter in its history.

• 5. Crisis and Restructuring

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  The late 1980s brought a different kind of reckoning. Over-expansion, poor management, and broad shifts in the publishing industry pushed Brill into an acute crisis. Between 1988 and 1991, under new management, the company undertook a major restructuring.

  Foreign offices were closed, including one in Cologne; the London branch had already shut by then. Most significantly, Brill sold its printing business. The firm's own description of this decision was stark: it amounted to amputating its own limb. The move was considered painful but necessary to preserve the company as a whole. Notably, no jobs were lost in the process.

  The restructuring worked. As of 2008, Brill was publishing around 600 books and 100 journals each year, with a turnover of 26 million euros. That recovery also brought a series of strategic acquisitions. Brill picked up the law publisher Martinus Nijhoff, originally founded in 1853, in 2003. It absorbed Rodopi, an Amsterdam firm founded in 1966 and named after a Bulgarian mountain range on the border with Greece, on the 1st of January 2014, gaining around 3,000 book titles at the time. In April 2022, it acquired full ownership of Wageningen Academic Publishers.

• 6. Typesetting, Fonts, and Open Access

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  The ability to handle non-Latin scripts that Luchtmans demonstrated in 1655 became a lasting part of Brill's identity. The firm eventually developed its own commercial typeface designed to support most of the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic character ranges, including the International Phonetic Alphabet and historical letter forms. The font was made available free for personal use. It was built to offer better diacritic rendering than most standard computer fonts, though not complete IPA coverage.

  Brill also moved early into open access publishing. The firm became one of thirteen publishers to participate in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a library consortium model for funding open-access books. In 2013, Brill partnered with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions to create the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award, recognizing initiatives in open-access monograph publishing. The company is also a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.

  These moves reflected a broader shift in scholarly communication, one that Brill was navigating while also expanding its digital presence through ebooks, online databases, and specialty collections across its subject areas.

• 7. The De Gruyter Merger

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  In October 2023, it was announced that the German publisher De Gruyter would acquire Brill for 51.1 million euros. The deal closed by the second quarter of 2024, creating a new combined entity called De Gruyter Brill. The merger brought together two of Europe's older academic publishing operations, each with roots in scholarly traditions stretching back well before the twentieth century.

  Brill had spent the years leading up to the merger operating out of its historic Leiden headquarters while also maintaining offices in Boston, Paderborn, Vienna, Singapore, and Beijing. The firm had been a public limited company, known in Dutch as a naamloze vennootschap, since 1896. That legal structure had outlasted two world wars, a near-bankruptcy, and a digital transformation of the entire industry.

  The Brill-Nijhoff imprint, which publishes over 20 academic journals, 20 annuals, and around 120 new book titles each year with a backlist of more than 2,000 titles, continues as a distinct presence within the merged organization - a reminder that some of the identities Brill absorbed over the years carry enough weight to persist even after the parent company itself changes hands.