Frederik Muller Rare Books under new ownership
Frederik Muller Rare Books has a new owner. Patrick van Rossum has acquired the firm from his good friend Frits Muller, great-great-grandson of the founder, who started his antiquarian business in 1993, formalised it in 1998 as Frederik Muller antiquarian bookseller BV and built it over thirty-three years into a respected name in the international trade in early travel literature, atlases and maps.
The name carries a long history. In 1843 Frederik Muller opened his antiquarian bookshop and auction house in Amsterdam and raised the sale catalogue to a work of scholarship, describing every book, map and print with a rigour on which scholars relied for generations. His catalogues of Americana, voyages and cartography made Amsterdam a centre of the rare-book trade, and after his death the house continued as Maison Frederik Muller & Cie until 1963. Frits Muller took up that tradition, with the same insistence on careful description, sound provenance and honest condition.
That is how the firm will continue. The stock, the archive and the standards remain. The focus stays on the Age of Discovery: the travel accounts, maps, atlases and globes that shaped the European picture of the world, together with the works of science, navigation and astronomy that made those voyages possible. Every work is offered personally and by appointment, with a full description, condition report and provenance where known.
Frits remains available to the firm for advice, and we are grateful for the trust he has placed in us. Collectors, librarians and colleagues are warmly invited to get in touch, to visit, or simply to follow what comes next.