A Notice Concerning the Late Meinhard Quist

A Notice Concerning the Late Meinhard Quist

Of the deceased this house knows three things certainly: what he bought, what he paid for it, and what the offices of this city have written down concerning him. Two of the three agree.

— Entered by the chief appraiser at the head of the catalogue

Printed at the direction of the Court of Wards · The estate of Meinhard Quist, of the Kolkgracht in this city · The house sealed 1635 · Sold 14–17 Sprokkel 1637

Buyers put three questions to this house at the pay table and put them in the same order every time: who the man was, how he came by the things, and whether the title is good. The third question is answered in the Conditions of Sale and in the papers lodged with the sale, which any person may see. The first two are answered here, so far as paper answers them. Where this house has no paper it has written nothing, and the reader is asked to take the blank spaces for what they are, which is the truth about what is known.

Of the Certificates

Three certificates of death stand in the file of this estate. All three name the deceased. All three were admitted by the Court of Wards, which admitted them in the order in which they were brought and has not set any of them aside. They are offered together in this sale, in one sheaf, and they are printed here as they read.

• The harbour certificate. Given by Aldric Sammen, coroner of the harbour, and entered in the Ledger of the Watermen against the fourth day of Winemonth 1635, in the words of that guild: taken from the water at the Sluice Basin. The guild's phrase is used here as the guild uses it and without addition. An extract of the ledger for that year, and for one other, is offered in this sale.
• The house certificate. Given by Doctor Sibbeke Mund of the Kolkgracht, against the nineteenth day of Slaughtmonth 1635, at the fourteenth house of that street, upon her own attendance: a wasting of the lungs, in his bed. Her fee is entered in the household accounts for that quarter and was paid.
• The chancery certificate. Given under the hand of Wibrand Teel, clerk of the Court of Wards, against the second day of Sprokkel 1636, brought into the court by Eustach Corvisser, senior partner of this house: as attested by two servants of the household. The place is not stated. The servants are not named. They are listed elsewhere in this catalogue as fixtures of the house at the Kolkgracht and are not offered.

The burial is entered in the register of St. Bavo's ground against the twenty-second day of Slaughtmonth 1635, with the sexton's fee, and the register is open to any person on payment of two stivers to the parish. This house does not undertake to reconcile the certificates with one another or with the register. It is not the office of an auctioneer to do so, and no office that is charged with doing so has done it.

A buyer who requires a date of death for his own purposes is advised to take the one that is written on the paper he needs, and to take it from the office that issued that paper, and not from this catalogue. The vendor's account is not before us.

[in red ink] This leaf is not the paper of the book. Hold it against the third window: the mark is a hand and a star, and the body of the catalogue is a crowned post-horn throughout. So this notice was set after the lots were set, and printed sheets are not reset for the pleasure of it. She wrote this last, and what is written last is written to answer something. C.O. (Lowmonth 1637)

Parentage, and the Beginning of the Collection

Meinhard Quist was born in this city in 1571, in the house in which he died, or in which one of the three certificates says he died. His father was a factor in tar and cordage and is remembered chiefly for a bankruptcy that was not his. His mother, Hilke Quist, dealt in instruments for ships out of the front room of the fourteenth house for twenty-six years, and dealt honestly and well: tide-reckoners, glasses, astrolabes, sounding leads, and the small brass work that a master buys on the morning he sails. Two lots in this sale came from her stock, and one of them, being the first thing in this catalogue, is the first thing the deceased is known to have owned.

A daughter of the house is entered in the register of the Beguinage of St. Bavo under the year 1575. She is not entered again. A leaf of that register is offered in this sale; it carries her entry and one other entry struck through, and this house has not been able to learn whose. In the Old Ground, beside St. Bavo's, there is a small stone of 1584 with the family name upon it and a given name of six letters, and the ground about it is kept, and the parish does not know by whom, the fee having been paid in advance for a term of years in coin, at the door, without a name.

He was schooled by Dirck Feddes, master of the school behind the Weighhouse, who sold him his first book for eleven stivers and a jack-knife and lived long enough to be asked about it. Feddes deposed to this house, in the year before he died, that the boy did not collect birds' eggs, coins, seals, or shells, as boys of that street did, and that he was thirteen years old when he began to write down what a thing had cost the person before him. That habit did not leave him. The purchase journal offered in this sale carries every price he ever paid, and against every price, in the outer margin, the weather of the day. He wrote the weather nowhere else.

Of the Collection, and of Its Subject

It is the practice of this house to print upon the title page of a catalogue the subject of the collection it sells: a cabinet of mathematical instruments, the plate and reliquaries of a religious house, the library of a jurist. The chief appraiser has had every one of these hundred and one lots in her hands, has had a glass upon them, and has spent four months looking for such a line. She has not found one and will not print one that is untrue.

The collection is not a collection of instruments, though it contains twenty-eight of them, four of which walk. It is not a collection of arms, though it contains a corselet, a boarding axe, a sword of justice with an edge that has taken one and sixty strokes and turned at none of them, and twelve musket balls cast out of a bell. It is not a collection of reliquaries, though the Beguinage of St. Bavo can account for six lots in this sale and will not account for the seventh. It is not a library. It is not an assemblage by maker: three makers appear four times each and the rest once. It is not an assemblage by material, by city, by century, or by price, the estimates in this catalogue running from two marks to four thousand.

What the clerks of this house found, having gone through the chains a second time at the appraiser's direction, is this. In more than two thirds of these lots, at least one link in the chain of ownership was not a sale between two willing persons. They are pledges forfeit and not redeemed; goods seized off a vessel and sold on the Customs Quay under licence; the effects of a bankrupt, an executioner, a widow, a hanged man; things bought at the winding-up of houses that did not choose to be wound up; things carried out of a fire, out of a flood, out of a family. The deceased bought at the Haak sale of 1616 and bought heavily. He bought at a sale in this city, in a year this catalogue has no occasion to name, the whole of a pledge-broker's residue, and he bought it in one lot and paid at the table. He bought the goods of Jorrit Haak in 1631 at the assignment, on the second day, in the afternoon, when the room had thinned.

He bought the paper before he bought the thing. This is the one habit every vendor and every clerk who dealt with him has reported in the same words. Where a thing came with no paper he sent for a copy of the paper from the office that held it, at his own charge, and where the office had no paper he had a copyist in the house who made a fair copy of what there was, and the copyist's work is in this sale, in a bundle, and the hand is not attributed. He paid one hundred and twelve marks in a single year in office fees and extracts, which is more than the household paid for fuel.

Whether he was buying instruments, or arms, or papers, or the histories that came with them, this house does not undertake to say. Buyers of a philosophical turn have offered the appraiser four theories in the three days of view and no two of them agree. The room will decide the matter in the only way a sale room decides anything.

The House with the Painted Shutters

The fourteenth house on the Kolkgracht stands where the merchants' ground gives out. Behind it the land does not run level to the water as it does further up the street; it falls, and the garden falls with it in two terraces of brick to the wall of the Sluice Basin, and at the foot of a stair of twelve steps there is a landing, a mooring ring, and a low door in the basin wall with a bar on the inside. The bar is old. The paint of the shutters is not: green, renewed within the last four years, and picked out at the panels in a dull red that the street calls the Quist red and the painters call cheap.

The house is deep and narrow, four rooms and a passage on each floor, and it smells of three things in this order: cold linen, brass polish, and the basin. The basin gets into everything on that side of the street at low water and the residents do not remark it. In the front room, where his mother kept her stock, the shelves are still bracketed for glasses and the marks of the brackets are in the whitewash. The stair is worn on the left. Every window on the water side has a shutter that closes and a second shutter, inside, that closes over the first, and in the whole house there is not one looking-glass.

The collection was never in one room. The appraiser's inventory has the lots of this sale out of eleven rooms, two landings, a cupboard under the stair, and a shed in the garden that had been a wash-house. Nothing was labelled in the way a collector labels. Under the base of a thing, in lead-white, in a small clear hand, there is frequently a number, and the numbers do not run with any list this house has found.

The house was sealed in 1635 and stands sealed. Six servants of the household remain in it and are listed in this catalogue as fixtures, being attached to the freehold by the terms of the testament and not offered. They are silent, they do not eat, and they keep the house. Teel, the clerk, has entered them at every monthly visit as present and in good order, and has noted twice, in his own hand and without comment, that the brass of the front room had been polished since his last attendance.

[in pencil] the plate of the eighteenth lot shows the shutters of the fourteenth house standing open. go and stand on the bridge at the old ground end and count them again.

How the Estate Came to This House

The Court of Wards took the movables of the estate into its hand at the sealing and held them for fifteen months. In that time it heard four claims upon them, admitted the certificates, and laid embargo upon eleven lots, of which nine were afterwards released and two are described in this catalogue and are not offered. The order of sale is dated in Wintermonth 1636 and is posted at the door of this hall for the four days.

• 1635 · the house at the Kolkgracht sealed by the Court of Wards, the movables taken into its hand
• 1636 · inventory in two parts, the first taken under seal in the cold, the second in Harvestmonth
• 1636 · order of sale to Corvisser & Lutt of the Rope Street, upon the house's bond of five hundred marks with the Waterbailiff and its commission of two in twenty
• 1636 · the movables removed to Rope Street in nine loads over eleven days, the strongroom lots by night and under the Waterbailiff's men
• 1636 · catalogued and drawn between Grassmonth and Wintermonth; the plates cut and the sheets printed by Melis Wilsum of the Staple Quay
• 1637 · offered, 14–17 Sprokkel, in four days, in the Long Room

Two other houses of this city applied for the order and one of them applied twice. This house obtained it, and buyers who wish to know why may have the answer at the pay table, where it is not a secret: Corvisser & Lutt had bought for the deceased, sold for him, valued for him, and carried for him for thirty-one years, and the greater part of what is in this catalogue passed once already across the presentation table under the rostrum in this room, going the other way.

Whatever is offered twice in this sale and not sold twice vests in this house under the fourth clause of the order, and is not afterwards accounted for to the estate. This is the usual clause and is printed here because it is usual and because the reader who counts the lots on the fourth day will otherwise wonder.

A Letter Lodged with the Sale

Copied at this place by the clerk of the sale room from the original, which is annexed to the claimant's petition in the file of the Court of Wards. The copy is set out entire, as this house prints a claim entire or not at all. Spelling and pointing are the writer's.

To the partners of the house of Corvisser and Lutt, in the Rope Street, these.

Gentlemen, and Mistress Lutt, to whom I think this will come first:

I am the daughter of Klaas Vantoc, pledge-broker of the Wolfsgat side, whose house was wound up when I was three-and-twenty and whose stock was sold in one afternoon to one buyer. I do not write to you about the winding-up. The law of this city is the law and I have had it read to me three times by three men who charged me for it.

I write about nine things in your catalogue. Eight of them I have seen through the window of your gallery, on your second table, ticketed, and one of them is my father's own pledge-book, folios twelve to nineteen, which you have made a lot of and priced. Consider what that is. The register that proves the theft is offered by the thief's auctioneer, at five and thirty marks, and I am to bid for my own evidence against the room.

Four of the nine entries are dated after the day the house was closed and the stock inventoried. Goods pledged in my father's strongroom on the fourth of a month cannot have been bought at a sale held on the first. They went out of that room before the inventory was taken and they went out in someone's coat. I have said this at the Court of Wards, and the clerk has written it down, and writing a thing down at that office is what they do there instead of the other thing.

You will say the papers must be heard. Hear them. But I will say this to you once and not again: the appraiser who took the inventory at my father's winding-up was of your own house then, and is not now, and nobody has ever told me why he is not. I am not a lettered woman. I can count a strongroom.

I ask that the nine lots be withdrawn until the court has heard me. Failing that, I ask that the sixty-third be sold last of its day, so that I may know how much money I do not have.

Ilsabet Vantoc, at the sign of the Two Anchors, Wolfsgat · the ninth of Lowmonth 1637

The claim stands referred to the Court of Wards, which has heard the claimant once and has set the matter down again for the day after the close of this sale. It relates to lots 7, 19, 31, 42, 56, 63, 71, 88 and 94, and rests upon three papers: folios of the pledge-book of Vantoc & Son; the Waterbailiff's seizure list of 1619; and a holograph deed of gift, said to be of 1614. All nine lots are offered without prejudice to the claim, as the order of sale requires, and a buyer of any of them buys subject to it and is told so from the rostrum when the lot is called. The house has not been shown the deed and does not adopt what is said of it. A second claim, by Barbara Wett, in respect of five lots, of which two are also in the nine, is lodged in the same file.

[in red ink] I have had that deed of gift in my two hands at the winding-up and I have not forgotten it. The down-strokes are black and the hair-lines grey, which is a hand copying and not a hand writing, and a deed of 1614 in this city was written in a gall ink that has gone brown by now on every page of every book in the Wolfsgat. The daughter has learned the trade she was born into and learned it badly. C.O. (Lowmonth 1637)

Papers Lodged with the Sale

The following is the list kept at the pay table. Where a paper is marked as offered, it is a lot in this sale and will leave this hall with a buyer.

Papers Lodged with the Sale, and Where They Lie

The Officers and Servants of This Sale

Perpetua Lutt, chief appraiser, sixteen years in this house, has had every lot in this catalogue in her hands, has taken every measurement in it twice, and has written every line of it. Complaints of a description are made to her in writing and are answered in writing. She is in the gallery on all three days of view from nine, and will not give an opinion on a maker in the room.

Eustach Corvisser, senior partner, seventy-one, in this house forty-six years, of which the last four have been spent chiefly in a chair. His signature is on the order of sale, on the bond, and on the account rendered to the estate. He attends the second and fourth days. He does not bid, does not value, and does not answer questions of title, and will send a buyer to the appraiser with a courtesy that has been mistaken for deafness.

Aleid Corvisser, night clerk and book-keeper, twenty-nine. She keeps the day-book of the sale, the book of the night inventory, and the accounts of the buyers, and she is the person to whom a wet ticket, a doubtful number, or a lot found where it should not be is reported. She is in the hall from six in the evening until the count is entered at eleven.

Bram Toop, crier at the rostrum, holds the hammer and reads the withdrawn lots at the close of each day. He calls the number, the lot, and the standing bid, and he calls nothing else. A buyer who wants a lot praised has come to the wrong trade.

Hanne Brust, head porter, eleven years in this room, with five men under him and four barrows tyred in hemp. He sets every lot on the presentation table and takes it off. He does not read, has never been asked to, and matches a ticket to a shelf by the shape of it, which he does faster than any clerk in this house can do it by the number. Numbers are read to him at the beginning of the round by the night clerk. Buyers do not ask him to shift a lot; they ask the clerk, who asks him.

Willemke Snoy, cashier, takes the price and the premium at the table, in coin, and gives a receipt under wax. She takes no foreign coin at a buyer's rate and has been shouted at for it by better men than are expected at this sale.

Jonet Fray, draughtswoman, thirty-three, drew the whole of the series of plates for this catalogue, one hundred and one in number, from Grassmonth 1636, working in the gallery and in the strongroom by lamp, three views to a lot and one chosen. The captions under the plates are her own and are printed as she wrote them. The plates are printed from her drawings. Neither has been collated against the other, this house not being a printer of pictures.

Footnote of the registry, entered at the making up of this copy: The draughtswoman has not attended this house since Sprokkel 1636. Her account with it remains open in the sum of thirty-one marks and eight stivers, and the sum is held at the pay table against her order or the order of her heirs. Her portfolio, being her property in the hands of this house under the eleventh clause of her engagement, is offered in this sale on the fourth day, in lots or entire, at the discretion of the room. Enquiries have been made at her lodging in the Wolfsgat and at the ropewalks and are entered in the day-book. The house sees nothing irregular in a draughtswoman finishing a commission and going to another city, and would remark only that persons owed money by this house usually come for it.

[in red ink] Look at the engraver's register and count the dates. The last four plates were entered in one week in Sprokkel and there is no receipt against any of the four, where every earlier week has her mark for the money. A woman is not paid for three seasons and then goes quietly to another city. She was cheated and the account is printed here to make the cheating look like a courtesy. C.O.

The Four Days

The sale is in four days, beginning at ten and closing at candlelight, with a pause at the noon bell. The first day is instruments, automata and curiosities; the second, arms, wards and reliquaries; the third, books, maps and correspondence; the fourth, the sealed and withdrawn lots and what has not been paid for. The withdrawn lots are read from the rostrum at the close of each day, in their places in the order, with the reason.

The week is expected to be foggy, as this week is in this city, the basin lying where it lies. Buyers who have not sat through a sale in fog are told that the hall goes quiet, that the lead glass gives a grey light in which a file-stroke can be read at arm's length, and that the porters call it good light. The doors to Rope Street are shut at the last candle. The hall is counted at eleven.

[in pencil] the register says the twenty-second of slaughtmonth. the sexton's account for that quarter is for two openings of one ground and a plate that was never set. read the second entry before you read the first.