The alchemical manuscripts
Symbolic illustration in rare displayed books.
Cornelis Springer — Public domain · Samuel Mudrík — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rijksmuseum — CC0 · A. J. van der Wal — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic combined three rare things: censorship far weaker than its neighbours', a global trading network that carried books everywhere, and a plural society of Protestants, Catholics, Sephardic Jews and French refugees. So Descartes and Spinoza were printed here, along with translations and books banned in France, Spain and Italy, and smuggled back into them. That background is what the library sets out to explain.
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The House with the Heads is a canal house of 1622 on the Keizersgracht, known for six carved stone heads on its facade. Popular legend says they are the heads of burglars struck off by a brave maidservant — an enjoyable story and an untrue one: the heads represent classical gods. The house today holds the Embassy of the Free Mind, the public face of an exceptional library: the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, a collection assembled by a Dutch businessman over decades, holding thousands of manuscripts and early printed books on hermetic thought, alchemy, mysticism, Kabbalah and symbolism. What is displayed is a small selected part of the collection, but what is shown is genuinely rare: books printed in the fifteenth century, illustrated alchemical manuscripts, and first editions of works the Church suppressed. The idea the place puts across is that seventeenth-century Amsterdam was free Europe's printing press — printing what was burned elsewhere.
Symbolic illustration in rare displayed books.
A canal house from Amsterdam's golden age.
Keizersgracht 123, 1015 Amsterdam