The artist and author Jan Cremer constructed his rebellious image by featuring a photograph of himself on the cover of his debut novel Ik Jan Cremer. The audacity of the writer, riding a Harley-Davidson Liberator and wearing a denim suit, was simply unprecedented in Dutch literature in the early 1960s. The advertising slogan ‘an unrelenting bestseller’ proved prophetic: twelve million copies of the book were sold worldwide.