Oudemanhuispoort: Van Gogh's Secondhand Book Passage

Why is it significant?

Step through the carved stone archway of the Oudemanhuispoort and walk down this quiet, gaslit covered passage lined with weathered wooden book cases.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step through the carved stone archway of the Oudemanhuispoort and walk down this quiet, gaslit covered passage lined with weathered wooden book cases. Dating back to sixteen zero-one, this passageway was originally built as the entrance to the Oude Manhuis, a municipal almshouse for elderly men financed by lotteries and the city council.

Since seventeen thirty-three, the city permitted street traders and bookbinders to set up stalls along the walls of this covered gallery. It has operated as a secondhand book market continuously for nearly three centuries, making it one of the oldest active literary markets on the European continent.

In eighteen seventy-seven, a struggling twenty-four-year-old aspiring artist named Vincent van Gogh lived in Amsterdam while studying theology. In letters to his brother Theo, Vincent described how he walked through this exact passage almost every single day, thumbing through cheap prints by Rembrandt and seventeenth-century woodcuts that shaped his raw artistic eye.

Step through the inner door into the secluded courtyard: the former almshouse now serves as the main faculty building of the University of Amsterdam. As students cycle through the passage with armfuls of books, the scent of old paper under these historic vaults links modern university life with four hundred years of learning.