There are the filigree houses with Gothic or baroque headboards, the diamond cutters, the brand new buildings of leading architects, the port, Rubens and Van Dyck... Any of them justify the trip and, yet, I had not even taken them into account. when selecting Antwerp as a destination. My objective seems less showy, but its depth is deeper.
It's no secret. UNESCO has included it in its list of world heritage sites. Although perhaps it is more discreet, like its elegant and austere façade. In any case, it should become a center of pilgrimage for everyone who has touched, even in passing, the world of letters, and even that of science or knowledge in general.
Its roots could go back to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to stop in Ugarit with its first alphabet, then go on to appreciate the numerous inscriptions left by the Greeks and Romans, also some volumes on parchment such as the wonderful Beatus or the Book of Wells, to stop in Mainz where Johannes Gutenberg found the revolution. Then he would search in the heart of the San Polo sestiere in Venice for the plaque that remains as the only memory of the printing press of the great Aldo Manuzio, who composed the most beautiful book and put into circulation the pocket books composed with his cursive or italic handwriting. And now, we have already reached Antwerp, in 1555, the heart of world trade.
It was then that Christophe Plantin, a Frenchman from the Tours region, decided to open a printing press. For this he counts first with the financial support of the familists (a heterodox sect) and then of the Calvinists. The company is going from strength to strength. However, a Calvinist pamphlet discovered in his quarters is about to ruin the business. Under the authority of the very Catholic Hispanic monarchy, the slightest Protestant quote triggers all the alerts. Plantin, who is traveling, will wait a year and a half before returning to the city. By then, all of his furniture has been sold.
But friends of his have bought it, who make it available to him, at the same time as they join the business as partners. To overcome Spanish suspicion in matters of religion, he will strive to publish a polyglot Bible that will earn him the title of archtypographer of King Philip II. Meanwhile, Plantin sets up a branch near Utrecht to publish what he cannot print in Antwerp.
The Officina Plantiniana becomes the largest publisher of the moment, publishing up to 260 works in five years. It touches all genres, the classics, medicine, mathematics, cartography. In his most prosperous years, he releases a new book a week. Sixteen presses work, two printers per press, twenty composers in the type boxes, three proof readers. With him, with them, the Church loses its monopoly on knowledge. Above the voice of authority, the truth of the evidence, the scientific method, prevails. And the company will remain alive with his successors, headed by his son-in-law Jan Moretus, to begin a slow decline when the religious book business declines, centuries later. Finally, Edward Moretus sold the headquarters of the Officina to the city of Antwerp, which opened it to the public as a museum in 1877.
Walk through the halls of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which surround a delightful central garden. In addition to furniture and artistic objects accumulated by the family, books, of course, and engravings and typefaces are also on display. I pass through the different rooms of the factory: the store, the offices, the room for honored guests, the proofreaders' room. There I discovered that they used the same signs that I learned at the time to indicate where and what to correct. In the workshop, among others, two presses with four centuries under their belt survive. Next to it, the drawers of movable type to compose the pages. The Officina even had a foundry where they could forge their types. And from a library, of course.
When I go out into the street, a thought comes to mind: what invention is there that, without modifications, performs its functions as well now as when it was invented more than five centuries ago? The harquebus?
