Plantin-Moretus Museum

The Plantin-Moretus Museum occupies a Renaissance and Baroque townhouse on the Vrijdagmarkt in Antwerp, in the Flemish Region of Belgium. Christophe Plantin, a French-born bookbinder, settled in Antwerp in 1548 and founded his printing house in 1555. He moved into the present premises in 1576, and the business flourished under his son-in-law Jan Moretus and subsequent generations of the Moretus family. At the height of its influence the firm printed books in Latin, Dutch, French, Spanish and Hebrew, including the monumental eight-volume Polyglot Bible of 1568-73, commissioned by Philip II of Spain. The family continued printing until 1867, and the City of Antwerp acquired the complex in 1876; the museum opened to the public the following year. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2005. The house itself is a major exhibit: visitors walk through panelled rooms with gilt-leather wall coverings, a courtyard with a vine, a shop, the proofreaders' room and the workshop. The collection includes the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world, dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, along with complete sets of punches and matrices for typefaces by Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon. The library holds about 25,000 volumes, among them manuscripts, incunabula and a copy of the 15th-century Gutenberg Bible. The firm's archive documents the book trade across Europe. Paintings in the house include portraits by Peter Paul Rubens, a friend of the family who designed title pages for the press. The presentation is largely chronological and atmospheric, letting rooms and objects tell the story. The building has been conserved carefully and remains in excellent condition.