A Brill Calendar: June 18

A few weeks after celebrating two silver jubilees – one for his publishing firm, the other for his marriage to Sara van Musschenbroek – Jordaan Luchtmans (Woudrichem, Holland, 1652) died, in Leyden, on June 18 1708.

In that leading ‘bibliopolis’ of Europe he had managed to found a substantial business in spite of a fiercely competitive climate for printing, publishing and book-selling; the distinguished family of dear Sara proving to be no handicap for success.

Jordaan’s generation in Holland witnessed great cultural and political shifts. After 1672, ‘annus horribilis’, when the Republic of the Seven Provinces almost ceased to exist – attacked and invaded by England, France and Münster – the main foe, Louis XIV, ‘Roi Soleil’, had been losing imperceptibly an earlier, indisputable dominance in Europe, while Leyden became a Mecca of scholarship and learning in the Western world.

It is seldom that family-succession corresponds so deftly with the ideal transfer. When Samuel Luchtmans (Leyden, 1685) followed in his father’s steps – the only surviving of four children, all sons – his progenitor, an autodidact and craftsman gone through the ranks of guild education & training, had ensured his boy graduated from Leyden’s Latin School earlier, and matriculated in the Law Faculty of the ‘Praesidium Libertatis’, a few steps from the family residence on the prestigious Rapenburg canal. Samuel, named after his maternal grandfather, also married a Van Musschenbroek girl, his niece Cornelia, in 1721, when he was 36 and his bride 22. The Dutch upper-class tended already before the 18th century to keep ‘the money in the family’. When founding a fortune is past, time has come to consolidate and expand: for the next generation.