Porn, pulp & literature

Online exhibit

In December 2019, the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library presented an unknown and long-hidden part of Flemish literature and cultural history: pornographic literature with the exhibition "Porn, pulp & literature". View the online exhibition here.

The Esperanto collection of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library

In 2016, the Hendrik Conscience Library acquired a large part of the library of the Flandra Esperanto-Ligo or Flemish Esperanto League. We’re talking to Esperantist Cyreen Knockaert, who has been cataloguing this collection for us as a volunteer.

Pornography in the library

Interaction between porn and literature in Flanders

Until recently, pornography has mostly been neglected by literary scholars and historians. Academic attention to pornographic texts was confined to a small range of literary authors with a canonical status, such as the notorious libertine author Marquis de Sade. Similarly, librarians were not interested in pornographic publications, which usually circulated in a secondary circuit of junk reading. As a result of this, the mass of these pulp publications, printed on low-quality paper and deemed unworthy of keeping, has vanished through time.

Ulysses to Baedeker

Three centuries of travel advice in pocket size

Gerrit Verhoeven is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History of the University of Antwerp. As an urban historian, he specialises in early modern Europe, particularly – but not only – the Low Countries and Western Europe. He has published on travel and tourism, on time awareness and human capital, on the resilience of social relations, and on book history. In this blogpost he writes about the research potential of travel guides kept in the collection of Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.

"Antwerp is a colonial city"

Historian Bas De Roo has been scouring our collection for books on Belgium’s colonial past for his dissertation on the flow of taxes and customs duties in Congo Free State. After his dissertation, De Roo worked at the University of Leipzig, where he researched the role of the Congolese elite in the governance of the Free State and Belgian Congo. Today, De Roo is a researcher at Geheugen Collectief, which offers historical research in an accessible way to a broad public in the form of exhibitions, historical walks, apps, publications ...

City of Antwerp and Google put more than 100,000 books online

The City of Antwerp and Google signed an agreement to digitise a large portion of the collections of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library and the Plantin-Moretus Museum.