Arthur van Schendel – Angiolino en de Lente

Angiolino en de Lente (“Angiolino and the Spring”) was written in 1921 by Arthur van Schendel, and published a few years later by publisher-printer Boosten and Stols in Maastricht, the Netherlands. This copy is clearly tainted by time, and the street library where I found it last autumn is not exactly climate-controlled storage either.

The colophon does not state a specific designer/illustrator for the cover, or a typographer for the interior. The text was typeset with Lutetia’s roman, italic and swashes. The initial caps are from Lutetia Open.

This fifth edition was published in 1943. The DBNL (Dutch digital library) has the publication history of this story.

The story itself is uses a common motif in pre-war Dutch literature: a (very sentimental) Christian variation on the concept of the noble savage. In this case the protagonist is a beggar with a pure heart. The story opening on page 5 (translated) is exemplary:

A sinful person is never completely sinful, just like a poor person, however poor, never has nothing whatsoever. How else could there be saints who, when they were little, screamed when they were hungry, and played in the dirt of the street, and maybe did things that no one but the Angels knows. But they had one spot that had remained white and when the golden rays fell upon it, their wickedness went away overnight, the drift […]

Note that the text block (including initial) follows the proportions of a square.