This group set includes all 9 hand-pulled photogravure plates (heliogravures) issued with the 1910 annual volume as well as 2 halftone frontispieces. The cover additionally features an unusual inset detail photogravure from the 1910 volume’s first plate: Rijplandschap te Laren by Barend Arendsen.

The masthead for the first issue of 1910 includes the following, with a customary editors note “The New Year” that follows:

17th Year     8 January 1910.   No. 1 

Geïllustreerd Weekblad voor Fotografie

International Survey of Photography and related subjects of Art and Science.

Chief Editor J. J. M. M. VAN DEN BERGH,

Villa Henriëtte in Soest

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Although the following editors note to the subscribers is optimistic for the new year, this would actually be the final year the Weekblad was published before being purchased and combined with a competitor photographic journal: Lux.

THE NEW YEAR.  (translated)

Before entering the new year circle for the eventful seventeenth time with its faithful, the editors and publishers of the Illustrated Weekly for Photography, offer their best congratulations, first of all to our Highest Reader, Her Majesty our venerated Queen and Her House – with which congratulations, without doubt all our readers will heartily agree – and further to all the friends of the magazine, among whom are many, whom we have the privilege of greeting today for the seventeenth time at the beginning of a new year, grateful as we are for the support and interest, experienced from them during such a great number of years.

The Weekly will not undergo any changes in form and structure this year. We have tried to make it, not a magazine that is thrown in the wastepaper basket after reading, but a standard work, containing everything that the year has yielded of importance at home and abroad, many articles by competent Dutch writers and an anthology translated, partly in abbreviated from German, French and English periodicals, partly in form. When one regularly reads the best magazines that exist – a gigantic task, which is fulfilled annually by our editors, but which makes them always the first to make important news and facts known in Holland, then one knows that the wheat offered contains a large proportion of chaff, often even of a poisonous kind. Stripped of that chaff, there remains enough pure grain to supplement what the editors have to say and what is provided by capable compatriots, even if the Weekly were to be changed into a daily newspaper, the sad necessity of being without include ripe and green in one column.

We enter the new year with confidence, counting on our readers and contributors and with the intention of being as versatile as possible.

At the request of many subscribers, articles will appear in the new year now and then, more specifically aimed at less experienced amateurs.

We always recommend sending beautiful photographic work, from professional and amateur photographers (regardless of whether or not they are subscribers to our magazine), for the illustration of the Weekly.

History: Geïllustreerd Weekblad voor Fotografie  1894-1910

The Dutch photographic journal Geïllustreerd Weekblad voor Fotografie (Illustrated Weekly Magazine for Photography) was published for 17 years, from 1894-1910. The masthead on the title page for yearly volumes owned by this archive indicate the “Weekblad” was the “Official Organ of the Amateur Photographers Association “Rotterdam” from at least 1903-1905, and most likely associated with the group much earlier. From 1893-1900, (1898 missing) the weekly was promoted as the Official Organ of the Nijmegen Amateur Photographers’ Association M.L. (1.)

The journal was initially published in Apeldoorn, a city in the province of Gelderland in the center of the Netherlands by Laurens Hansma from 1894-1906. Hansma, (1860-1920) according to a short biography by the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam was “an enthusiastic amateur photographer….the publisher of more than fifteen books on photography, including Kleurenfotografie, Fotografie voor den natuurliefhebber, Gomdruk and Het fotografeeren in de tropicen. Laurens Hansma is seen as an important figure in the spread of photography in the Netherlands.”

From 1907-10, the “Weekblad” was then published in Zutphen, located approximately 30 minutes southeast of Apeldoorn- also in the province of Gelderland, by W.J. Thieme & Co.

At the end of its 17th year of publication in late 1910, the journal was purchased and incorporated into the pages of the Dutch photographic journal “Lux” (geillustreerd tijdschrift voor fotografie-illustrated magazine for photography). Now published by J.R.A. Schouten, Lux (1889-1927) took on the former weekblad’s top editor, J. J. M. M. Van Den Bergh, with him joining the growing publications editorial staff.

1. List of Dutch amateur photographers and their circle before 1900: Dissertation: Mattie Boom: Doctoral degree: Erasmus University Rotterdam: “Kodak in Amsterdam The Rise of Amateur Photography in the Netherlands 1880-1910” (p. 142)