"The Plantin-Moretus Museum (Dutch: Plantin-Moretusmuseum) is a printing museum in Antwerp, Belgium which focuses on the work of the 16th century printers Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus. It is located in their former residence and printing establishment, the Plantin Press, at the Vrijdagmarkt (Friday Market) in Antwerp and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005."
Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp.
It is all too easy to forget that one, while vacationing, can also learn things. At the Plantin-Moretus Museum, I learned how a printing press works, which was something I've been attempting to understand for the better part of 10 years.
yo dawg I heard you like f o n t s
I also learned that it was apparently commonplace to spank apprentice typesetters:
I have developed a new and inexplicable interest in typesetting, just in time to meet the world's two oldest printing presses:
It appears, regrettably, that they do not have names.
All my future correspondence will begin with the letter
because it is the first letter of my name, and because I am Extra.
If libraries, rather than printing presses, are your jam, I have some good news about the Plantin-Moretus Museum:
It has an extensive library of books dating back to the 14th Century.
The exhibits themselves are informationally dense, but exactly as succinct as they need to be to get their point across. They encompass a huge breadth of subjects, and present their material frankly, with no bells and whistles, and in a linear, easy-to-follow layout.
They also know how to catch one's eye:
It's not just about typesetting and printing. Plantin-Moretus Publishing was responsible for some of the earliest medical texts, including all their wild and wooly illustrations:
Get down, get down / Get down, get down
When your friends ask you to open up to them but you take it too far
"They invited me to a party, but I simply haven't a thing to wear."
"Makin' my way downtown, walkin' fast, faces pass, and I'm homebound..."
The Moretus family also bequeathed to the museum their extensive and luscious collection of original manuscripts.
If this lettering doesn't make you just about cream your jeans, then get out of my face.
The museum's almanacs offer important informational tidbits to help plan your weekend:
While their Gutenberg Bible simply lurks, unassuming, under glass:
Its paragraph-initial lettering defying damn description:
Here, we also find Christopher Plantin's pride and joy: the Polyglot Bible.
The first four volumes contain the Old Testament. The left page has two columns with the Hebrew original and the Latin translation, the right page has same text in Greek with its own Latin translation. Underneath these columns there is an Aramaic version on the left-hand page and a Latin translation of this on the right-hand side.... Volume 5 contains the New Testament in Greek and Syriac, each with a Latin translation, and a translation of the Syriac into Hebrew. Volume 6 has the complete Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, as well as an interlinear version that has the Latin translation printed between the lines. The last two volumes contain dictionaries (Hebrew-Latin, Greek-Latin, Syriac-Aramaic, grammar rules, list of names, etc.) that were of value to scholars. (Wikipedia)
It is humbling, to say the least. And here I sit, writing a blog post about it. What would Plantin think, to see his Bible captured here, to know that Syriac is dead, that his Bible lives only behind glass, pages turned once every three months; but that it is still admired by crowds of wanderers, illiterate and ignorant in all of its languages and more, yet thrilled by its mere existence?
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