It occurred to me that what I’m doing with this project is similar to what Yorick van Norden did for his book The Platenkast van Paul McCartney (“Paul McCartney’s record collection”) which came out earlier this year. Except that my project is a linguistic one. But we both have in common that reading the spines of records (in his case) or books (in my case) is not always easy.

So here we go again. Yesterday I happened to be in Delft, which houses The Netherlands’ best-known technical university and of course the home of Vermeer.

Very surprised at what I found in Paagman, situated near the Grote Kerk in the city centre, and a bookshop I was only familiar with in The Hague. A huge language section, which even included images of Haagse Harry (statuettes and Christmas decorations no less) that would be more suitably displayed in a bookshop in The Hague (and most likely are).

An impressive array of dictionaries in multiple languages, as well as a large selection of guides for learning foreign languages, including Greek (very hard to find when I embarked on the language two years ago) and Croatian (in Dutch as well as English).

The second picture shows a whole shelve of – again – taalboekjes, on various topics, as well as writing guides. No usage guides here, unfortunately, neither for Dutch nor for English.