This book is based on a more extensive Dutch-language study of the retail trade in Amsterdam between 1550 and 2000, which was published by Verloren publishers in 2013. I am grateful to Thys VerLoren van Themaat for granting permission for the early modern part of the study to be published here in English. When producing the English-language edition, I benefitted from the expertise and advice of Inge van der Bijl at Amsterdam University Press and from Vivien Collingwood's translation skills. This English-language edition would not have been possible without the support of four funding institutions, and it is with pleasure that I mention the financial contributions from—in alphabetical order—the Amsterdam University Fund, the De Gijselaar-Hintzen Fonds, the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam and the Professor van Winter Foundation.

The research that underlies this book is based on a very considerable quantity of archival material, and I would like to thank the employees of the Amsterdam City Archives for their contribution to this project. This consisted not only of lugging around large quantities of records and helping me to find yet more archival material, but also of the trouble they have taken over the years to digitize many thousands of images and make them available via the image archive (Beeldbank). In this study, these images form an important source of information on the exterior and interior of shops. I also looked for visual material elsewhere, and in doing so I benefitted, among others, from the expertise and suggestions of Mrs Miekie Donner, who managed the collection of the Royal Antiquarian Society of the Netherlands (het Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap). I am also grateful to the late Dr Henk Zantkuijl, who provided detailed answers to my numerous questions about front steps, pothuizen and display cases in Amsterdam, and who also put me on the track of relevant prints and architectural drawings. Finally, colleagues, students and former students informed me when they came across images that might be of interest to the research. Without mentioning specific names, I am extremely grateful to them all. I should add that I am aware of the limits of visual material when reconstructing the material life of the past, and that is precisely why the results of the image-based research were constantly tested against what was recorded in written sources on shops.