Some of the world’s rarest documents will soon be available online for everyone.
Some of the world’s rarest documents will soon be available online for everyone.
Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, announced last week (June 16) that he’s donating €300,000 to digitize a collection of ancient books. The 4,600 pre-1900 texts on alchemy, astrology, magic, and theosophy are housed in Amsterdam’s Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, also called the Ritman Library.
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They include extremely precious texts on Hermeticism, an occult tradition that began roughly in the second century AD, and early printed editions of the Bible and the Quran:
One particularly important text that will be digitized is the first English translation of the works of Jakob Böhme, a 17th-century German mystic. Says Esther Ritman, the library’s director and librarian, “When I show this book in the library, it’s like traveling in an entire new world.” Once the work is available online, she says, “We can take everyone along the journey of this book digitally.”
The bulk of the collection is expected to be online and available for free to the public by spring 2017.
