A Brill Calendar: October 14

Christophorus Plantinus and the Big Book Sale

Few auctions of the remains of a publishing company can compare with the one conducted October 14th, 1619, in Leyden.

The stock of books awaiting the highest bidder was immense. Hendrik Haestens, member of the influential Guild of Printers and Booksellers in the university town, produced on his press an elaborate print-run of the list describing them. Early in the third millennium, only one copy of it survives; in the Royal Library in Brussels, Belgium. It lists several hundred specific titles. The brochure must have been printed in a considerable number of copies.

Less than forty years earlier, in 1583, Christophorus Plantinus (Saint-Avertin, France, c. 1520 – Antwerp, Southern Netherlands,1589) already a legend in his own time - ‘typographus academicus’ and arch-typographer to Philip II, Habsburg King of Spain - started an enterprise and worked for a while in the Protestant North; a further European offshoot to his already famous printing establishment in Antwerp. A short while afterwards ‘Plantyn’ returned to his ‘headquarters’, leaving the Dutch subsidiary to be directed by his son-in-law Franciscus Raphelingus; in Dutch parlance, ‘Frans van Ravelingen’.

It is seldom that the founding of a new university caused such a wealth of new activity, and such an increase in international exposure than in the case of Leyden; the town becoming, slowly but surely, a city of books comparable with Venice, Paris, Bologna and London. Plantyn’s son-in-law, not only a master of his craft, but also a scholar of Arabic language and literature (introducing to Holland this previously unknown script), became an important asset to the brand-new Academy, extending its range of teaching and learning contingently and unexpectedly. It may be said that with this day’s auction, the ‘Big Bang’ of publishing for an international scholarly readership in Leyden had come full circle.