Visit to the Plantin Moretus Printing Museum in Antwerp (Belgium)

During my solo road trip Belgium – Germany in 2020, I was fascinated by two printing museums and decided to visit them again in 2023 with JB. These are my two favorite museums in the world! Today, I’m going to talk about the Plantin Moretus Museum in Antwerp (Belgium). This article is for those who will never go there, a more concise description without spoilers is available here for those who will visit it someday.

Part 1: Travel Journal
Part 2: Practical Tips

Part 1: Travel Journal

Practical info

The Plantin Moretus Museum is in the city center, and overlooks a green and very pleasant square. It used to be a printing house and home where several generations of the printer Plantin lived, whose international fame was gained thanks to the quality of the books printed at his establishment.

Prices : Entry costs €12 (you can pay by card) and an audio guide in French (and other languages) is provided for free. You just need to scan the numbers on each room’s door to access the commentary. I highly recommend the audio guide because there’s a lot of information not available on the signs. The signs are in Dutch, French, and English and are also worth consulting.

It took me 2.5 hours to look at everything, visit everything, and read everything, but if you’re not an enthusiast, I think 45 minutes will be enough for the main rooms. A map is provided on site and shows you the most important rooms.

A sublime setting

Well, you should know that the setting is magnificent. The ground floor was reserved for business (printing shop, store, office…) and the first floor for the family, so we get a little idea, even though the house has been turned into a museum, of what it was like in the past. In the middle, there’s a very pretty garden.

The museum can be a bit dark, but that’s to protect the many old books printed by the Plantin-Moretus family over several generations. Know that they only printed the books; the binding was done elsewhere, so we only have access to the printer’s trades: making letters, the typeface, layout, printing, ink selection, engravings, etc., but you’ll see, there’s plenty to learn.

Ground floor

On the ground floor, in a small room, there’s a man responsible for a live demo with an old mechanical press. We get to print a poem in French live! The text is already prepared in advance. The text is composed, as you know, of letters placed one by one, upside down. Ink is applied to the text, a sheet of paper is placed on top, everything goes through the press, and voilà, a printed page! Before, ink was spread using two dog leather pads (!!) (dog leather was used because it had almost no pores and the ink could be spread better), but fortunately, now they use a silicone roller. A tourist present is tasked with operating the press. It’s his first try, so he doesn’t do very well, and it’s obvious the poem is poorly printed (not enough ink). The museum man asks him if he wants to buy the print anyway; he says yes and will end up paying for this badly printed sheet at the gift shop (I don’t know how much). With experience, I know it’s poorly printed, but a casual tourist probably won’t know. Be careful!

We visit other rooms on the ground floor, more or less interesting…

For example, we learn that proofreaders were scholars, polyglots. The need for dictionaries became apparent with printing, because they had to agree on spelling and grammar rules; otherwise, how would you know what to correct? In the case of religious texts, the proofreaders were priests. I can’t even imagine the work involved in making corrections. How do you find the letter to replace among this forest of tiny black letters? I’m so glad that computers were invented since.

The portrait of Seneca by Rubens is THE painting to see on the ground floor.

As well as other small prints:

… and then, we arrive at the printing shop. There are several presses, 400 years old, but above all… a huge collection of letters in all sizes, in all fonts, with decorative elements, uppercase, lowercase, spaces…. it’s so pretty! All I want to do is play with them, form words, create a text… but of course, it’s all inaccessible to us.

It’s incredible to think that before computers, people had to search for each letter, set them by hand, add spaces by hand, adjust line spacing by hand… print x pages, then start from scratch for the remaining 199 pages. Plus, ink and paper were expensive, so it was customary to make very small books to make them more accessible, cheaper… with tiny letters! Not to mention Arabic and Hebrew letters… it takes too much expertise and skill!!

Look closely at the spaces at the end of each line, they come in such varied sizes! And this text isn’t even justified. Imagine the work required for justified text!! At the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, they explained that to justify the 42-line Bible, you need to use variable-size spaces, have letters that are slightly wider/thinner than standard letters… the work is colossal for each line. Now, with computers, we don’t even think about it. In a fraction of a second, text can be justified, but centuries ago, it was 100% manual!!!

First floor

We go upstairs, and that’s when we’re explained the difficulties of having a beautiful book.

First of all, a book is meant to be read, so it must be READABLE. For that, the font used has a big impact! A beautiful font can make a printer successful, as is the case with Mr. Plantin. It’s so important that he paid to have exclusive fonts proprietary. Garamont, a famous font maker, made several matrices for him. He also got his hands on italic fonts (which are called that because they come from Italy). Using an italic font saves space, paper, reduces production costs, and allows selling more. Garamont’s beautiful fonts inspired the modern Microsoft, Adobe… and now we have several Garamond fonts available on our computers! Times New Roman is also adapted from a font once used in printing. Even the ink smudge traces are incorporated into modern typography to recreate those beautiful letters.

Font choice remains important today, more than we think. There are fonts that are more environmentally friendly, for example, because using them means less ink, and the text stays readable! There are also fonts better suited for signs (sans-serif fonts), fonts that take up less space (cursive and italic fonts), fonts more readable on computer screens, etc. Also, I recently learned that writing in cursive allows you to write faster. So when cursive writing was invented, it was a true innovation.

Moreover, Steve Jobs, known for his aesthetic sense, pays close attention to the fonts used by Apple. They are named after cities: New York, Chicago…

Next, to understand why printing became so successful from the 15th century onward, you have to go back to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. The Plantin Museum doesn’t focus on this aspect because they aren’t behind the innovations in question; it was Gutenberg who found a way to create letters very quickly using a special alloy. The more robust letters you can produce industrially, the more you can print. Whereas before, using wooden letters carved one by one by hand, it took a long time to produce 200 letter a’s, 200 letter b’s, etc. The semi-industrialization of letter production (about 15 seconds per letter thanks to the new alloy) is the secret behind the rise of printing!

So, how do you make a font and letters?

First, an engraver makes the punches. They are the ones who create the “font.” They can keep their punches or not. Generally, the Plantin-Moretus family buys the punches so they are the only ones who can use the font created by the engravers. Otherwise, engravers sell what is called a “matrix” to several printers. The matrix, with a special mold, allows for the mass production of lead letters. The difference between a punch and a letter (for printing) is that a punch exists in a unique version – whereas printing letters are mass-produced from these punches.

Libraries

You can also admire the two library rooms. The busts of authors are placed there because it’s nice to read a book, look up, and see the bust of the book’s author. These libraries are unfortunately not accessible to the public. The perfectly bound, leather-covered books are too beautiful!

Since I bought my reMarkable e-reader, I read much more than before. However, a library like that doesn’t necessarily appeal to me. I think you should have a minimalist library : top 5 books of all time per category, for example. Building such a library isn’t easy: you have to read hundreds of books to be able to choose those top 5 books. These are books you’ll read and re-read several times, for which you can buy a very limited edition, or have a special binding done to protect the book.

There is however a reading room, which must be booked in advance (along with the works you wish to consult). The list of 25,000 old books is available here.

Engravings & Prints

During my last visit in 2020, I visited too quickly and missed the museum’s engraving collection. I’ve developed a small passion for engravings since I took an etching course at the Petit Palais in Paris.

If we have letters for texts, how do we print images? Engravings are exactly for that! Copper plates or wooden plates are engraved. Copper plates are etched with acid, i.e., a protective layer is applied to the plate. You draw by scratching the plate, so all scratched parts are no longer protected, and after soaking in acid, they are like hollowed out, and you can deposit ink on them and print. This technique is very interesting because it allows for subtle contrasts (by drawing more lines, fewer lines). Copper plates are more durable and allow more detail than wooden plates. But metal was, at the time, very expensive, so not all books benefited from this technique. Let me let you admire the micro-details of this print:

For wooden plates, it’s the opposite: it’s a relief printing technique. Everything that is carved/removed is not printed.

Plantin was also a publisher, and his geography/maritime books were highly appreciated.

To be able to print old books, you also have to own them. The Plantin family has a beautiful collection of handwritten books. The colors are more vibrant, the decorations more numerous.

We then enter a room where I feel really uncomfortable. There are too many portraits “staring” at me 😀

I’m intrigued by the printing shop’s logo and the paintings in the museum. The compass isn’t the most used tool in printing. It’s a symbol of Freemasonry. Yes, I recognize them now thanks to Dan Brown 😀 When I did some research, I found information about Christophe Plantin:

“In the Netherlands, the Plantin printing house in Antwerp was one of the main centers for producing beautiful books in the 16th century. Christophe Plantin fled Paris (where at least one printer had recently been burned at the stake for heresy) to Antwerp, where he became a citizen and began printing books as early as 1555. For over two hundred years, the Plantin printing house had a monopoly, granted by the papacy, for printing liturgical forms; however, in 1562, suspected of heresy (Masonic/esoteric ties?), Plantin fled to France for two years. After 1564, Plantin opened a new shop under the sign De Gulden Passer or “The Golden Compass” (also his printer’s mark). Notice the hand of God in this design, holding a compass tracing an incomplete circle, with the motto ‘Labore et Constantia’ (‘By work and constancy’). Like the Masonic logo: the compass always points downward. […] The hand of God or a divine presence is usually represented by the letter ‘G’ (God = Geometer) and/or by the Delta triangle. Furthermore, the motto of persevering or constant work summarizes one of the main duties of every Freemason: self-improvement and self-fulfillment in the world. Thus, the roots of what we would today call a fraternity of Freemasons are detectable through visual culture in the Netherlands as early as the mid-1500s.”

Source: Rembrandt: Turn of the Key on the Boston University website

The Netherlands and the Flemish side of Belgium welcomed many “heretics” driven out of other European countries. Traces of ancient secret societies can still be found in Antwerp.

Here are the almanacs of the time:

This richly colored and printed 12-meter scroll is the museum’s pride.

My favorite book among the colored books in the museum is the following. Admire the details:

The 36-line Gutenberg Bible

The treasure of the library is the 36-line Gutenberg Bible. The museum itself doesn’t know where it came from or who bought it 😀 You can admire the perfectly justified text. To achieve this result, you need to take a lot of time, use a slightly smaller space, or a thinner, wider, etc. letter ‘a’. Now the computer does it in less than a second, but when it was done by hand, having justified text was a technical feat, reserved only for high-quality books. You can see that the initials were colored because they were drawn by hand, according to the style chosen beforehand by its owner. This Bible was not printed here.

Here is the information about this Bible, as indicated on the museum’s website:

ONE OF 14 COPIES
The so-called ‘Gutenberg 36-line Bible’, named after the number of lines per column, is the second Bible printed in Europe. It is also the oldest printed work in a Belgian museum. There are still 14 copies of the 36-line Bible. Its ‘age’ explains its invaluable worth. Printed with the original equipment of Joannes Gutenberg, it goes directly back to the beginnings of typography.

THE SECOND OLDEST BIBLE!
Historians long believed that this edition from 1461 (or even earlier) was the oldest. The Gutenberg 42-line Bible turned out to be older: 1452-1455. Regarding the 36-line Bible, various elements point to Bamberg as the place of production and Albrecht Pfister as the printer. But it is more likely that other printers worked with this set of Gutenberg’s type.

THE SUPPRESSION OF THE AUGUSTINIAN ORDER
The copy in the Plantin-Moretus Museum has a singular origin. It is a gift from the Augustinians of Nuremberg to their confraternity in Antwerp, which opened a monastery there in 1514. But the Antwerp Augustinians are accused of heresy. Their monastery is sold in 1522 and their goods are put up for public sale. It is not known exactly how the Bible ended up in Plantin’s library.

The Multilingual Bible

It is this Bible that brought Plantin international fame: a multilingual Bible:

‘Christophe Plantin, rightly famous for his craft as a printer, endeavors to revitalize all other arts. His great intelligence and remarkable knowledge, his imposing capacity for work and his constant efforts, his precision in everything he undertakes make him incomparable. Words fail me’ – Foreword by Montanus for the Biblia sacra

ARIAS MONTANUS (1527-1598)
This theologian will coordinate, for five years, at eleven hours a day, the edition of the Biblia regia. He writes the following for Philip II: ‘More is done here in one month than in Rome in a whole year’. Montanus and Plantin also become close friends. And even when Philip II recalls him to Spain in 1575 to develop the Escorial library, Montanus continues to exchange letters with Plantin and Jan I Moretus.

BIBLIA REGIA – BIBLIA POLYGLOTTA
It is thanks to the financial support of Philip II that Plantin will achieve his absolute masterpiece: the multilingual Biblia polyglotta or Biblia regia. This work consists of eight parts: four devoted to the Old Testament, one to the New Testament, and three ‘Apparatus’ or commentaries. The Bible text itself is printed in five languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this virtual visit, and maybe it made you want to visit it yourself.

Part 2: Practical Tips

The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10am to 5pm. (The museum closes early at 3pm on December 24 and 31.)
exceptionally open on Easter Monday and Whit Monday

The museum is closed every Monday, except Easter Monday and Whit Monday
January 1st, May 1st, November 1st, and December 25th

Ticket: €12 (full price), €8 (reduced price). The audio guide is included (I highly recommend taking it)

Are you planning a trip to Belgium? Our partner Get Your Guide offers entry tickets and guided tours with French-speaking guides at very reasonable rates. Click here to see what they offer and book online.