In this Dutch master thesis I study the amount of popular scientific books about astronomy appeared in the Netherlands during the nineteenth and twentieth century, and how it was popularized.
First I looked into several catalogues to discover how many astronomy and astrophysics books have appeared during the nineteenth and twentieth century, and how many of them are popular scientific. At that last portion I look at trends in the publication of these books, the differences between translations and original Dutch books, the important publishers for this genre and the authors who wrote most books with this subject. From this data I constructed a descriptive model.
Then I described the different techniques used in these books to make the science popular, after which I looked into several books to see which ones were used. I analyse the use of these techniques in an overview.
From these two parts I deduced that during the 1850's Frederik Kaiser, an astronomer from Leiden, caused both a peak in the book production as a change in the way astronomy is made popular. In the twentieth century several astronomers revived astronomy, leading to two generations of authors actively writing popular scientific books, causing a strong increase in the amount of published books.
The following publications resulted from my master thesis:
In the research and writing process, I used several computer programs:
I used the LaTeX template from Olivier Commowick's PHD thesis as a basis for my master thesis, which can be found over here. I noticed that his template is very easily adjusted to your own needs, so if you're writing a thesis, you might want to consider looking at his work.
I offer the following downloads: