A collection of rare books, reportedly among the most valuable in the world, will go on public display at Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room.
The books originally belonged to the Fagels, a pioneering Dutch family who accumulated great wealth which they spent acquiring one of the largest libraries in Europe, consisting of 30,000 books and manuscripts.
The Fagel family were an important part of the Dutch golden age, a period from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th when the Dutch led the world in scientific and artistic discovery.
During that epoch, the Dutch Republic, despite being a tiny state on the edge of Europe with a population of less than two million, accumulated a huge overseas empire and considerable wealth emanating from its colonies.
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They gave the world the artists Rembrandt and Vermeer, the astronomer Christiaan Huygens and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza among many world-renowned figures.
Successive generations of Fagels were involved in the Dutch Republic in this period and rose to the highest offices in the land.
Not only did the Fagels believe that knowledge was power and books were status symbols, but they regarded many of the books in their collections as works of art to be enhanced.
Many of the books were purchased as manuscripts without bindings. How the books were bound and illustrated was a mark of prestige on the part of the purchaser. In the case of some of the books, they are embellished with hand-drawn illustrations which add greatly to the value of the work.
One atlas in the Fagel collection shows an accurate map of the world as it was then known. The Dutch were innovative cartographers and Joan Blaeu produced a 17th-century masterpiece – the Atlas Maior. The copy in the Fagel collection includes paper after paper of hand-drawn illustrations. Similar books have sold for more than €1 million at auction.
The process of producing these books involved the highest level of craftsmanship. “You have engraving on one side and text on the other. Those are two separate printing processes. To get all of that to line up perfect is what makes these books so complicated to produce and expensive,” explained project manager Ann-Marie Hansen.
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The Dutch Republic ended when French revolutionary forces overran the country in 1794. The then patriarch Hendrik Fagel fled to England with his library, which was acquired by Trinity College Dublin in 1802, increasing its number of books by 40 per cent in one fell swoop.
Half of the vast collection has now been catalogued, opening up the heritage library to scholars. There are 2,000 volumes within the collection which are the only known copies in existence.
Part of the vast collection will now go on display in the university’s Long Room as part of an exhibition which will be opened by the ambassador of the Netherlands to Ireland Adriaan Palm on Wednesday. There will also be a three-day conference involving Dutch and Irish scholars based on the collection.
The project is a collaboration between the Library of Trinity College Dublin and the KB National Library of the Netherlands. It is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was launched following the state visit of the king and queen of the Netherlands to Ireland in 2019.
