In 1843 a young Amsterdammer named Frederik Muller opened an antiquarian bookshop and, almost without anyone noticing, changed the way the world handled old books, maps and prints. He was twenty-six, the son of the Amsterdam professor Samuel Muller, and he had grown up in a house where books and history were simply part of the air. From his father he inherited an almost inexhaustible capacity for work, a quality he admired in others and could not forgive its absence in anyone.
Before he struck out on his own he spent six years apprenticed to his uncle, Johannes Muller, who kept an old-fashioned book auction house on the Rokin. There Frederik learned the trade from the ground up: editions, printers, paper and provenance. But where his predecessors bought and sold whatever happened to pass through their hands, Muller worked the other way around. Within a single subject he would try to assemble as complete a body of material as could be found, and only then bring it to the market through a catalogue.
And his catalogues were not price lists. They were works of scholarship, carefully described, annotated and arranged, so that a sale catalogue doubled as a bibliography that scholars would consult for decades. In this he joined two worlds that had stood apart: commerce and learning. He was convinced, as he wrote in the preface to his America catalogue of 1872, that the antiquarian could serve science, bibliography and literary history above all, without forgetting his own profit, provided his mind was not wholly engrossed by money-making.
That conviction produced a series of landmarks. Between 1872 and 1875 he issued his three-volume Americana catalogue, still a reference point for the bibliography of the New World. In 1859 came the Bibliographie neerlando-russe, regarded by later map historians as the first Dutch bibliographical study devoted to atlas cartography. From 1850 he gathered an immense collection of Dutch historical prints and maps, recording more than eight thousand items; and with P. A. Tiele he ordered and described thousands of Dutch pamphlets from the years 1500 to 1702, to most people worthless paper, to Muller a historical source.
His reputation reached far beyond the Netherlands. The Imperial Library in St Petersburg turned to him, through Baron von Korff, to supply everything ever printed about Russia; for the explorer and collector Nordenskiold his firm was for years the principal purveyor of books. Through his work Amsterdam became once again a hub of the international trade in rare books and maps. In 1876 he took Frederik Adama van Scheltema as his partner and moved to the Nieuwe Doelenstraat, where the auction house Frederik Muller & Co. was born, a house that, after his death, would also deal in paintings and win international renown as connoisseurs of art.
Frederik Muller died in Amsterdam on 4 January 1881. That same year the Dutch state acquired his collection of historical prints, which has been kept ever since in the Rijksprentenkabinet of the Rijksmuseum. His name lived on in scholarship and teaching, not least in the Frederik Muller Academie, the first Dutch training school for library and documentation work, named after him in 1964. But his deepest legacy is a conviction: that an old book is never merely merchandise, but a document that deserves careful description and respect. It is that same conviction, more than a century and a half later, that his great-grandson Frits Muller carries forward under the very same name.