EFE METİN ÇETİN
My fascination with antiquarian books began at fourteen, in Istanbul, in the Balat & Fener district, which is a part of the city where old things have always tended to end up, tucked between the antique dealers and the fish restaurants, along the winding streets that slope down toward the water. I spent my weekends there, going through whatever the street vendors had laid out that day, most of it unremarkable, some of it not.
My interest in historical works began—well, twice, really. The first time was almost incidental: an old Turkish book from the 1960s on Socrates and Aristotle, nothing rare or particularly valuable, but I remember being struck by the binding, the weight of it in my hands, and that specific smell old paper has that no new book ever quite manages. I didn't know yet that this was the beginning of anything.
Me with some books, 2025.
The second moment was the one that actually mattered. I came across an early nineteenth-century volume of English verse romances, and something about it struck me differently than the Aristotle book had. It wasn't just the binding this time, or the marbling on the pages, though both were beautiful. It was the realization, somewhere between excitement and mild disbelief, that I was holding an object that had existed, physically, for two hundred years before I had. Regency England, a world I had only ever read about, sitting in my hands on a Saturday afternoon in Balat. That was the moment the collecting stopped being a curiosity and became something closer to a habit I never grew out of.
Eager to learn more, I spent some time working in a local bookshop, where I was able to deepen my understanding of book preservation, history, and craftsmanship. Gradually, what began as a small personal collection evolved into a more deliberate effort to curate, study, and protect historical works.
An old, humble bookstore in Balat where I worked as a teenager, taking my first steps into the world of antique books.
Over the years, the Deltian Library has grown well beyond its beginnings. It was first based in Ottawa, Canada, where I completed secondary school, and is now based in Amsterdam, where I continue to expand the collection and refine its focus. Today the Library holds a privately curated selection of rare and historical works, with holdings reaching back to the 16th century. My particular focus lies with the Estienne printing family, alongside other printers of the same period, whose typography, scholarship, and craft I return to again and again. In 2026 I was awarded the ILAB (International League of Antiquarian Booksellers) Scholarship to attend the York Antiquarian Book Seminar.
I am currently a student of Economics and Business Economics at the University of Amsterdam, with a minor in Logic and Computation at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Economics is my formal field of study, but logic, philosophy, and mathematics remain central to how I think and learn. Curating the Deltian Library lets that broader intellectual interest, particularly in history and philosophy, stay part of my work rather than separate from it.
The Library rests on a belief I have held since I began collecting: that the rigorous study of the past sharpens the understanding of the present. Augustus de Morgan once wrote, 'so hard upon poor discoverers are men of science who are not antiquaries in their subject!' I have simply taken him at his word, and become an antiquary in a rather more literal sense.