Sepp publishing family


Four generations of the Sepp family, publishers and artists were naturalists or entomologists. The Sepp company became famous for the numerous large natural history collections of plates that appeared between 1768 and 1860. They published translations from English, French and German authors on natural history, prints by Petrus Camper, an anatomist, but also some religious songs. Pieter Cramer and Caspar Stoll, also entomologists, had their works published by Sepp.

Genealogy

Christiaan Andreas Sepp

In the first generation was Christiaan Andreas Sepp, born in Goslar, the son of a conrector, who established himself shortly in Hamburg and Göttingen, but before 1739 in Amsterdam as an etcher and engraver of land and sea maps. His son, Jan Christiaan, was baptized in 1739 in the Lutheran church, like Johanna Elisabeth in 1744. In 1750 Christiaan bought a house at Rozengracht, in the Jordaan. Sepp was working from his own collection of preserved butterflies and insects wrote and illustrated Nederlandsche Insecten in English, Dutch Insects, which appeared from 1762 to 1860, the company's first long-term project. There are similarities with the work of August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof and René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur.

Jan Christiaan Sepp

His son, Jan Christiaan Sepp, joined his father's business. He married in 1768 the 14-year older S. Focking, the daughter of a Dantzig paperseller. After she died in 1773 he remarried. He moved to a house at Haarlemmerstraat, which probably also served as a bookshop. All his children were baptized in the Mennonite church. In 1777 he was one of the founders of Felix Meritis, a "club" where artists and scientist gathered or discussed, with an eminent building on Keizersgracht. Five years later he was a mennonite teacher on Singel.
Jan Christiaan was an engraver, etcher, bookseller, author as well as illustrator for Nederlandsche Vogelen. The price for the complete set of books was 525 Dutch guilders. It must have held the record for being the most expensive book published in the Netherlands for a very long time.

Jan Sepp

Sepp brought his son Jan into the business, which then traded as J.C. Sepp en Zoon. After the death of Jan, the work continued to be published by Cornelis Sepp until 1868.

Publications