Today we spent almost the whole day in the Plantin-Moretus printing museum. Christoffel Plantin (1520-1589) began his work as a protestant printer but became an arch-printer for the Catholic bishop after Antwerp came under Spanish Catholic control. The museum is a perfectly preserved printing press from the mid-sixteenth century. The presses, type and a wealth of early books are maintained as well as the family’s private rooms. We saw an incredible polyglot bible, a parallel-text Bible with Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. They also displayed atlases and maps by Gerardus Mercator—very beautiful. Of particular interest to me was a 1580 pocket size edition of Mercator’s Teatrum Orbis Terrarum. Each opening of the book had text on the left and an engraving of a country or region on the right. It was amazing that such a pocket-sized edition existed so early on.
In the evening, we had a candlelight dinner at long tables down in the basement of a building where once cloth and paper and books were warehoused before being shipped to England. Our host Guido Latre speculates that Tyndale’s bible had clusters of pages slipped into the folds of the cloth for smuggling back into England.
Jet lag is not bad but I sleep at odd hours of the night. There seems to be a nice nightlife in Antwerp: I walk in the evening past many outdoor cafes filled with people enjoying drinks and music.
In the evening, we had a candlelight dinner at long tables down in the basement of a building where once cloth and paper and books were warehoused before being shipped to England. Our host Guido Latre speculates that Tyndale’s bible had clusters of pages slipped into the folds of the cloth for smuggling back into England.
Jet lag is not bad but I sleep at odd hours of the night. There seems to be a nice nightlife in Antwerp: I walk in the evening past many outdoor cafes filled with people enjoying drinks and music.
