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“It is said that Dutch homes found space for 3 million pictures on their walls. Maybe, but they produced many more books, perhaps as many as 300 million.” — The Bookshop of the World, Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen, 2019 
“Relative to size of population, the Dutch published ten times as many books as printers in France, Spain or the Italian city-states, and five times as many as in the Holy Roman Empire.”
— The Bookshop of the World,
Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen
— The Bookshop of the World,
Andrew Pettegree & Arthur der Weduwen
On how almost of nothing of the popilar texts and printed matter has survived from the Dutch Golde Age, and what has survived wasn't very popular. As an example, the 1627 painting by Pieter Claesz shows a page from an almanac given a second use as pepper corn package.
“In bookshops, most new books were sold as loose sheets without binding, and it was up to the purchaser to have them bound. This normally meant taking them to a bookbinder, in a different shop. Sometimes the binding of the book would have cost more than the text itself.”
