A Brill Calendar: September 29

Few of his fellow-citizens in Leyden  had expected Jan Thys (Johannes Thysius 1622-1653) to die at such an early age.

Upon the death of Thysius Sr. in Amsterdam in 1630, the widowed family was raised and educated at Leyden by Constantin ‘l Empereur, Professor of Eastern languages. Being independently wealthy, ‘beyond dreams of avarice’, Thysius collected a superb library in a very short time. In his last will and testament, drawn up at Leyden September 29, 1653, he stipulated that his treasure should stay together forever ‘at the public service of study’.

The ‘Bibliotheca Thysiana’ is, some 350 years later, a veritable time-capsule. It is seldom indeed that a carefully assembled body of books not intended to grow – or to shrink – can enjoy the serendipity to stay in the same room in a contemporary building for so long a time. Perhaps its greatest treasure is Aldus Manutius’s ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (1499), according to generations of connoisseurs the most beautiful book ever published. The stupendous ‘ Astronomicum Caesareum‘ (Ingolstadt 1540) bought by Thysius from the collection of the English king Henry VIII, is another miracle.

In a world fascinated by dramatic change and relentless growth, there is scant room for the poetry as evoked in the verse ‘I rejoice that things are as they are’. The endowment of Jan Thys to his Academia is also a monument the immutable dignity of abstaining from change for change’s sake.