Collecting areas

The library has a unique and still growing collection of 25,000 titles on Western spirituality and philosophy.

The founder of the library, Joost R. Ritman, is an Amsterdam businessman with a deep interest in spirituality. He began collecting books at a young age, after his mother had presented him with a 17th-century copy of Aurora, a work by Jacob Böhme. Böhme is one of the authors who is a permanent source of inspiration for Ritman. When he decided to transform his private collection into a library open to the public, his vision was to bring manuscripts and printed books in the field of the Hermetic tradition under one roof and show the interrelationship between the several collecting areas and their relevance today.