Bibliorgasm

I was sorting through random assorted brochures and pictures from trips taken in the past two years and came across one that called out for further research and reminiscing: a brochure from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

The what? Only the museum that I dragged several family members up from Belgium to see, inspired by a blog post at Curious Expeditions that would make any book lover's heart leap for joy. Which blog, by the way, I highly recommend you explore if you haven't already. If you rolled your eyes at my inclusion of family in the nerd trip, rest assured: they enjoyed it.

Anyway, this museum resides in an old Dutch printing house and chronicles the history of that house, and of printing in the Netherlands, for the first several hundreds of years of its history. Included among its treasures is Christoffel Plantin's Biblia Polyglotta--a bible printed in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, and Latin. The house became a center of humanist thought (and of course, the distribution thereof) in the sixteenth century; Plantin took upon himself the task of printing a great deal of current humanistic and especially scientific literature. Of course, he was not simply a starry-eyed idealist. The house owed its success to a lack of ideological rigidity that led him to print Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and humanist texts all at once. The Biblia Polyglotta may have been both beautiful and the product of sincere scholarly effort--but it also mollified the Catholic king. Interestingly, the business was also far ahead of its time in its creation of a union and provision of health benefits.

And it had a lovely library. Behold:



Or, imagine heated humanistic debates taking place here:

Wonderful. And inside are hundreds of books. Old books. Beautiful prints, a progression from the most primitive type to lavish color illustrations and their plates. Machines, buckets of letters, the type foundry. They even printed music:

That one didn't turn out so well, but you get the idea. Also geography books:


Plantin's willingness to back almost any sort of Renaissance project was astonishing. Needless to say, it's a beautiful place, and peaceful--as you might imagine, a print museum in Antwerp is fairly "off the beaten path." The moral of this story is: seek out those nerdy side museums. They're worth it. Print museums in particular are surprisingly prolific and contain oft-forgotten but fascinating bits of the history of human knowledge. Next up: some old but fascinating maps uncovered at an antiques shop in rural Missouri (if I can find them again). Stay tuned.