 Among the treasures of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica are the "Corpus Hermeticum" published in 1471, the first illustrated edition of Dante's "La Divina Commedia" from 1481, and Cicero's "De Officiis" printed in 1465.The founder of the library, Joost R. Ritman (1941), was an Amsterdam businessman with a deep interest in spirituality.He began collecting rare books at a young age, after his mother had presented him with a copy of a seventeenth-century edition of “The Aurora”, a work by Jacob Böhme, one of the authors who are a lasting source of inspiration to him.