Museum Plantin-Moretus
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How it came to be
Christophe Plantin (c. 1520-1589) was the greatest printer-publisher of the second half of the 16th century. In 1576 he moved with his family into the house called the Golden Compass in Antwerp and set up his press there, and the core of the building went up in 1576-1580. Antwerp was then one of the three leading printing cities of Europe, with Paris and Venice.
Plantin's eight-volume Polyglot Bible of 1568-1573, setting Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Syriac texts side by side, was one of the most complex books of its time. After his death his son-in-law Jan Moretus I took over, and the Moretus family went on printing on the same spot until 1867.
In 1876 Edward Moretus sold the firm to the city of Antwerp, and the house became a museum. It holds the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world, type matrices and a painting by Rubens. The firm's archives joined the Memory of the World Register in 2001, and the house was inscribed in 2005.
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