Part I presents the booksellers accounts from the first volume extant (1697) up to 1803. The remaining volumes in the series (1804-1845) have been included in Part II.
— the remaining volumes of the booksellers’ accounts, covering the years 1804 to 1845. Contemporary indexes were compiled by the firm for all except the last volume (1842-1845) and have been filmed here.
— the series of accounts of private individuals and institutions, which runs from 1702 until 1836 . These were also indexed by the Luchtmans company. The social quality and gender of the customers is often mentioned, which will facilitate a variety of sociological inquiries into this material. Among their customers, the Luchtmans counted many professors and students of Leiden University, Protestant clergymen, local and provincial magistrates and officials, doctors and lawyers, merchants, burghers and members of the nobility. Among the institutions that patronized the firm were schools, libraries and reading clubs. The presence of many Gallic names among the accounts attests to the prominence of the French émigré community in Leiden and the Dutch Republic.
— information on titles purchased by Luchtmans at auctions and other public sales held in Leiden or elsewhere, either for the firm’s own account or for third parties and about the costs involved in printing various books, such as for wages, paper, printing plates, title pages and shipping.
— various parts of the bookkeeping including balance sheets for the period 1810-1850/51; a record of the payments made to the firm’s members from 1756 to 1845, specified by book title, date and amount; warehouse records showing inventory; and finally the account of the Latin School of Leiden (ca. 1750-1834) to which books were furnished "by order of the rector".
— a great variety of information including the accounts of the city and university of Leiden; accounts with booksellers kept in foreign currencies with information on exchange rates and discounts; accounts of cash receipts and expenditures; copies of letters sent, many written in languages other than Dutch, especially French, covering the period 1777-1790 and 1807-1812 and the day by day record of transactions with the name of the person, the book or goods sold or received and the amount, which were used in preparing the general annual accounts of the booksellers and private individuals; the account of the reading circle Miscens utile dulci for the years 1817-1831, listing the Dutch, German and French books purchased from Luchtmans. The last number in this section give lists of subscribers to various periodicals.
— a set of 33 printed catalogues of the firm, almost all of them interleaved and annotated, ranging in date from 1714 to ca. 1841. It provides valuable bibliographic and price data. The oldest also contains a handwritten balance sheet of the company drawn up by Samuel Luchtmans, a very rare document for that period. Another such item is found in the 1747 catalogue.
— seven handwritten price lists and stock catalogues, the oldest from ca. 1747 and the latest ca. 1831.
— travel journals kept by the Luchtmans during various trips to England, France and Germany (Frankfurt, Leipzig, Dresden, among others), between 1749 and 1784.
— the firm’s surviving correspondence. It is international and multilingual in scope and provides a host of information on many aspects of the publishing and bookselling business in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and, incidentally, on political and social events of the times.
— Bibliographic information on book titles, dates and places of publication, print runs, types of books; the firm was especially well known for its series of classical authors, for example, the works of among others Hesiod, Aristophanes, Caesar, Horace, Cicero and Tacitus, and other serious publications of various kinds.
— Information on prices of books in various currencies and monies of account.
— Business relations with other book dealers; Luchtmans is essential for the study of the "confrater" trade in books (i.e. the exchanges between dealers). Countries where they had contacts include: Germany, Italy, France, England, Switzerland, and Portugal.
— The reception of various works in various places and times.