A Brill Calendar: March 18

Family Traditions: Muller-style

Few collective efforts require more than one human generation in order to reach their objective.

If such a ‘longue durée’ is foreseen, or self-evident, the process is destined to vanish slowly out of sight of the news-media and the public eye. The interval between adjacent elections and terms of office – some four or five years – determines today the pace of development and change, whilst charismatic individuals receive almost intemperate attention.

In traditions of Western scholarship, however, it is certainly not exceptional that projects ‘resist’ completion within this shrinking timescale. Occasionally, tasks are inherited from a parent to be carried on by offspring; the enterprise becoming a family responsibility.

In the Netherlands, for instance, the area of professional interest of Frederik Muller (Amsterdam July 22 1817 – Amsterdam January 4 1881) generated a tradition of interests - all mutually compatible. When autodidact Muller started an antiquarian bookshop in 1843 his two sons, Jacob and Samuel, were not yet born. Jacob, the youngest (Amsterdam, born July 14 1858) became a member of the Editorial Board of the ‘Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal’ (a titanic lexicographical effort which had been started before he was born and wasn’t completed when he died) and eventually a Leyden Professor in the Dutch language. Samuel, Jacob’s senior by some ten years, developed into an internationally acknowledged authority on making reliable inventories of archives and document collections.

Father Frederik’s inspiration is naturally concomitant to this scholarly progress; he may be considered the Founding Father of modern bibliography in the Netherlands and an astute connoisseur of prints, drawings and graphical arts. The personal collection of this great do-it-yourself innovator was purchased by the Government after he died in 1881 – a transaction arranged before that year was over – to become a cornerstone of the ‘Rijksprentenkabinet’, the State Collection in this field.