Academic publisher Brill - sometimes known as EJ Brill, Koninklijke Brill, and Brill Academic Publishing - can trace its origins to the Seventeenth Century.
Netherlands-based Brill publishes some 700 new books and 200 journals a year, and its output includes important natural history series such as Fauna Entomologica Scandinavica, World Catalogue of Insects, The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, and The Geometrid Moths of Europe.
Individual Brill titles include Aquatic Plants of Britain and Ireland, The Liverwort Flora of the British Isles, and An Atlas of the World’s Conifers.
Brill’s history embraces more than 300 years of academic publishing, and has always had an international flavour. Since the beginning Brill has been based at Leiden, home of the oldest university in the Netherlands.
It’s early output was primarily biblical studies, theology, Oriental languages and ethnography, but its catalogue expanded during the Nineteenth Century: The Lord’s Prayer in 14 Languages, 1855, was intended to demonstrate the company’s ability to typeset non-Latin languages, while in 1848 it published a two-volume Handbook of Steam Engineering.
