Description

Early printed newspapers are fugitive publications, rarely surviving in more than a few copies. Many titles and thousands of issues from the 17^th century have been lost altogether, but occasionally new serials continue to turn up in archives and libraries. This article discusses the discovery of a hitherto unknown French news serial published in 1621. Eight issues were found in the Fagel pamphlet collection in Trinity College Dublin. The series, entitled Nouvelles Neutrelles, appeared as a quarto pamphlet of four to eight pages. Whereas the periodicity of the series is unknown and the pamphlets are unnumbered, it is certain that these eight pamphlets constituted a determined effort to publish a regular news serial which furnished a wide variety of international news reports. As the Nouvelles Neutrelles were published anonymously, this article sets out to discover, through an analysis of the news reports and typographical material, where and by whom the Nouvelles Neutrelles were printed. This investigation reveals that the series was published in Brussels as a competing venture to Abraham Verhoeven’s famous Nieuwe Tijdinghen (Antwerp, 1620–1629). The printer of the Nouvelles Neutrelles is exposed to be the court printer, Huybrecht (I) Anthoon, who can thereby be named as the publisher of the oldest Brussels newspaper and of the second French serial to appear in Europe.