A Brill Calendar: July 22

Few words have had their meaning narrowed down as strikingly as ‘bibliography’.

Coined during the beginning of the Christian Era from the Greek, ‘bibliographia’ meant for many an age ‘the writing of books’; any book. The usage prevails until the 18th century. When Conrad Gesner, the German-Swiss Founding Father of bibliography as we now understand the word, published his Magnum Opus in 1545, he called his enumeration of existing books ‘Bibliotheca Universalis’, not ‘Bibliographia Universalis’. Bibliography as systematic description of books and texts aiming at the increase of scholarly knowledge - a separate discipline of intellectual inquiry - is a child of the European Enlightenment. Its objective is to provide useful information to a specific readership of any size: from a small institute via a nation to trans-national communities.

Amongst the Dutch, it is seldom that the bibliographer as a professional in this specific connotation is better embodied than by Frederik Muller (July 22 1817 – January 4 1881; both in Amsterdam). It may be said that this autodidact created, almost single-handedly, the theoretical and practical curriculum for scholarly education in his field of interest. Today, the Academy carrying Muller’s torch is named after this antiquarian, book-seller, auctioneer, collector, connoisseur and detective of forgotten, discarded, unknown, lost or misinterpreted books, prints and manuscripts.

Frederik’s sons – Samuel (1848) and Jacob (1858) – were so to speak born in archives and repositories of documents; by the end of the 19th century the scholarly Muller dynasty had set new European standards for ordering and describing existing archives; devoting special attention to the provenance of individual items.