Louis found himself, therefore, obliged to give up his first place of business, but he was not willing to confess himself defeated. During his brief experience as a bookseller, he had been able to impress himself favourably upon some of the authorities of the University, and in his present distress he applied to them for help. The University council, recognising the value for higher education of the service to be rendered by a skilled and conscientious bookseller, gave him permission to construct within the limits of the University court a small book-shop, and authorised Elzevir to announce himself officially as the bookseller, and, later, as the publisher, to the University. With this fresh starting point, Louis succeeded, after some years of persistent and painstaking labour, in creating an assured business foundation. He had never mastered the art of printing, and the typographical work of the publications issued with his name was done under contract with different printers, and presented no feature of special excellence or distinctiveness. The works selected, however, for Elzevir’s publishing list, together with the books selected by him through Frankfort and Paris for sale in his shop, gave evidence of a good literary and scholarly ideal and of a continually widening range of knowledge of existing literature. His correspondence throughout France, Germany, and Italy brought the name of the new University to the knowledge of many literary circles, and established for Leyden and for the towns of Holland which depended upon Leyden for their foreign literature, connections with the book-producing centres of Europe, connections which were never thereafter to be severed. Louis was, during the greater part of his lifetime, the only publisher and bookseller of Holland having such foreign relations. At the time when the new State was securing through the force of arms and the skill of its ambassadors the political recognition from the Courts of Europe upon which its continued existence depended, its literary representative, Louis Elzevir, was, in like manner, securing for Dutch scholarship and for Dutch publishing enterprise an honourable recognition from the scholars and with the book-trade of Europe. The first work published by Louis as a venture of his own was an edition of _Eutropius_, issued in 1592. It was, however, not until after 1594 that his publications began to appear with any regularity. In 1595, he first utilised as a trade-mark the design of an eagle grasping in its claw seven darts, an emblem which was retained by the House for nearly a third of a century.