A.J.F. van Laer is best known for his translations of the Colonial Manuscripts, work done before the disastrous State Library fire of 1911. The first four volumes of the New York Historical Manuscript series, now called New Netherland Documents, still stand as a model translation of seventeenth-century Dutch. Van Laer accomplished this work during his tenure as Keeper of Manuscripts at the New York State Library. Following the fire, however, Van Laer suspended his translations of these archival records of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. The trauma of the fire, during which he witnessed the destruction of over two million books and damage to the Colonial manuscripts, seemed to contain his drive to provide historians with reliable translations. It would be almost a decade before he would take up the translator's pen again.