Hub.Hubben

Ritman’s magical library: the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica.
State purchases one of the most beautiful book-collections

A great number of books to lick one’s lips over are in the Ritman collection, partly acquired by the state last week: thousands of rare books bought by a businessman with a true collector’s passion.

Never say ‘never’, but it would be a strange turn of events if the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica of businessman Joost Ritman were to meet with the same fate as the library of the flamboyant book collector Boudewijn Büch. After the latter’s death, the heirs took the circa 100.000 books of the author/globe-trotter to auction. Büch didn’t mind that his library would be dispersed after his death, but anyone who had the privilege to enter his book-palace on the Keizersgracht will be saddened by it, if only because today it is virtually impossible for a private person to gather together such an extensive collection.

On the other hand, the quality of Büch’s collection was varied and uneven. He was an eager buyer who purchased dozens of books at a time through catalogues and antiquarian bookshops – and sometimes forgot to pay for them, too. Joost Ritman (64) is another story. For years he was also a truly inspired collector of art and books. His zest for collecting knew no bounds thanks to the millions he made with the production of disposables for airline companies.

Ritman collected almost anything one can imagine: eastern rugs, etchings by Rembrandt (more than a hundred!), lacquered boxes, art nouveau jewelry, porcelain, seventeenth-century glass and silver, antique furniture, paintings of Dutch masters. Between 1976 and 1992 Ritman spent 95 million guilders on art objects, about as much as all Dutch museums together spent on art in the same period. Ritman bought with great expertise.

Foto: Joost van den Broek, Hollandse Hoogte

Books are his greatest passion. Amazement, admiration and, I admit, jealousy, are the sentiments that vie for preference in the heart of the book lover who visits Joost Ritman’s life’s work in the Bloemstraat in Amsterdam: the library holds 20.000 volumes. Among them are the rarest and most beautiful books on the face of the earth. Books dating from the last thousand years – many bound in leather or vellum – furnish the walls of three connected buildings, fixed by the gazes of the busts representing the Florentine dynasty of the De Medici bankers and patrons of art. About a third of the collection has recently been purchased by the State of the Netherlands for the amount of 18,75 million euros. With this the state concretized the protected status of the library which, since 1994, falls under the cultural heritage act. The books acquired have immediately been given in loan to the library. The value of the entire collection is estimated at about a hundred million euros.

As a sixteen-year old adolescent, Joost Ruben Ritman started collecting books. He wanted to build a collection which, as he once put it, ‘concentrated on the stepchildren of theology, philosophy and science’. The core of the collection is formed by manuscripts and books by hermetic philosophers, mystics, alchemists and Rosicrucians. The Ur-text of hermetic philosophy, a philosophy which regards the spiritual knowledge about God, man and cosmos, is the Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to the Egyptian mystery figure of Hermes Trismegistus and dating to the first centuries of the Common Era.

From late antiquity onwards, many thinkers, writers and scientists have studied and commented on the complex and not always very accessible texts from the Corpus Hermeticum. Mindful of the ad fontes-principle, which is the basis for the library, Ritman collected all possible early printed books and sources that were even remotely related to hermetic philosophy. A philosophy which could be summed up with a pithy citation: ‘Earthly man is a mortal God, the heavenly God is an immortal man’.

With this adage in mind the world of the antiquarian book proved a mer à boire for a man who had fabulous amounts of money at his disposal.
The BPH’s 500 manuscripts, 300 incunables (books printed before 1501) and thousands of books printed before 1800 are deposited in two rooms and are made available to researchers upon request. Their value may equal the price of a villa in Tuscany: the first illustrated edition (1481) of the Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri; the illuminated Book of Hours of Beatrix van Assendelft, one of the most important late medieval manuscripts from the Netherlands; the first printed edition of the Imitatio Christi by Thomas a Kempis, a copy once owned by the French printers and publishers Firmin-Didot; the Biblia Germanica, printed in 1483 by Anton Koberger and containing 109 woodcuts, appears side by side with Plantin’s eight-volume Polyglot Bible.

Esther Oosterwijk-Ritman (40), the collector’s daughter and since two years director of the BPH, together with curator José Bouman, shows treasure after treasure, such as the editio princeps of Plato’s Opera of 1484 in the Latin translation of Marsilio Ficino, a book that can hardly be lifted up. Most copies of this edition are incomplete as the translation was published in parts; the Ritman library copy, however, is complete. Breathtaking is the two-volume history of the micro- and marocosmos by the English mystical philosopher Robert Fludd, an encyclopedia (1617) that covers all scientific disciplines and is filled with engravings that refer to the foundations of the hermetica.
There is also a copy of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in which, just before his death (1543), Copernicus proved that not the earth but the sun was at the centre of the universe. Interestingly, it appears that Copernicus, supporting his then daring thesis, quoted Hermes who centuries before held the same opinion.
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We penetrate ever more deeply into the layers of the collection’, says Esther Ritman, which also appears from the arrangement of the books on the library’s shelves in such a manner that visitors can easily find their way. This especially goes for the modern (post-1800) books and reference works that can be found in cases with headings such as Kabbalah, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Modern Devotion, and Freemasonry.

Many of the books were purchased by Frans A. Janssen, professor in the history of the book and the library, appointed by Ritman as director of the BPH in 1983. Janssen was head of the library for nearly twenty years and, assisted by José Bouman, made the collection available, turning the BPH into an institution of world fame. In 1986, remembers Joost Ritman, in an overcrowded and overheated auction room of the French auctioneer Drouot in Paris, Janssen succeeded in laying his hands on the first edition of the Corpus Hermeticum (1471), translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino. The book forms the heart of the BPH and according to Esther Oosterwijk-Ritman is regarded by some as ‘the second great revelation next to the Bible’. To honour Janssen, an exhibition compiled by Theodor Harmsen opened on 4 December last year (to be seen until July 2005) devoted to one of Janssen’s favourite humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (ca. 1460-1536).

During the Gulf War in 1991 Ritman’s bankers became nervous and stopped the money-flow when he did not pay his debts quickly enough. The enormous art collection went under the hammer and ING bank threatened the library with the same fate. The history of the long battle between the bookkeepers and an impassioned book-collector still needs to be written, but the winner is Ritman.
A long time ago Boudewijn Büch expressed his displeasure about Joost Ritman’s buying behaviour in de Volkskrant. ‘The Ritman collection is a magical collection. Many strange scary books by Rosicrucians and so on. The cultural value is limited’.
Jealousy, it must have been blind jealousy. Büch’s dodo versus the pelican, the symbol of Joost Ritman’s book-palace near the Westertoren. An unequal battle, Büch knew.

Exhibition: Theodor Harmsen, Drink from this fountain, an exhibition in honour of Frans A. Janssen, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, until July 2005. www.ritmanlibrary.nl


Translation of an article by Hub.Hubben which appeared in De Volkskrant, 21 April 2005.