An Angel Among Publishers: Jos Knipscheer In Memoriam 1945-1997

With thanks to Franc Knipscheer

The Hague, Winter 1997

My Reflections

It is difficult for me to separate Jos Knipscheer the man from Jos Knipscheer the publisher. For me the two dimensions are hard to keep apart. Even when he became ill and his involvement in the publishing business was sporadic at best, he was and remained “my publisher.” In this respect his significance for me lies in the fact that he more or less prodded me to choose writing as a profession. He did this by continuing to publish my work, by regularly inquiring about new work, by greeting my manuscripts with joy and treating them with appreciation. But more than anything else, as my editor he turned me into the self-assured writer that I am today by giving me the unlimited freedom to search and to experiment; he remained present and involved by asking just the right questions and by letting me find the answers.

It was around 1977. I had been living in the Netherlands for three years. By that time I had three publications to my name: a collection of poetry, a novel and a novella. As was customary (and still is), these had been privately published in Paramaribo. Jos Knipscheer was working at the time for various newspapers, among them PLUG and the Volkskrant. He had discussed my work in those papers, and in quite positive terms. It was the first time that a Dutch journalist had given any coverage to my work in the pages of a Dutch newspaper. Jos Knipscheer made sure that I received copies of his reviews. About a year later he attended a Suriname literary evening in Amsterdam and came up to speak to me. He told me that he was interested in my work and was launching a publishing company. We have been in touch ever since.

Jos Knipscheer has given back to Dutch literature its colonial past in the form of authentic voices. His commitment was never incidental but structural. And I believe that he could take all the risks he took because he knew that what he and his brother Franc (and others) were doing was necessary and right. He inspired me to produce manuscripts because I knew that he cared not only for my work but also for me. I’ll never forget him. His position in my life is fast and secure, an anchorage for my beginnings in the Netherlands. Meeting him was the best thing that has happened to me as far as the Netherlands is concerned.

His Biographical Facts

Jos Knipscheer (born 7 February 1945 in Amsterdam) began his career in the book trade in the early 1970s, first as a translator (among his works were Angela Davis’s An Autobiography, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and four novels by Richard Brautigan) and as a literary reviewer of non-white Dutch and English literature for the important Dutch daily newspaper the Volkskrant and as editor and pop journalist for the musical magazine OOR.

In 1975 he became the co-founder and editor of MANDALA, a magazine for international avant-garde and ethnic literature. To continue this multicultural idea, he and his brother Franc began a literary publishing house in 1976 that they called IN DE KNIPSCHEER. During those early years, IN DE KNIPSCHEER was for many Native American and black American authors the first non-English publisher to issue their novels in translation. Examples are James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, Craig Strete, Leslie Silko, Alice Walker, Charles Johnson and Ishmael Reed. These were soon followed in 1980 by translations of English, French and Spanish Caribbean and South American writers such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Earl Lovelace, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Miquel Barnet, Ariel Dorfman, and Osvaldo Soriano. A typical feature of their publishing program was to issue original Dutch works by young authors whose roots were in the former Dutch colonies (Indonesia, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles). They launched the now-famous Jewish author Leon de Winter, the Euro-Asians Marion Bloem and Frans Lopululan, and...