Joseph Basile Bernard Van Praet (Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....

, 27 July 1754 - Paris, 5 February 1837) was a Flanders-born librarian and scholar active in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

.

Bibliothèque nationale

During the French Revolution he increased the stock to three times its previous amount: the printed collection went from 300 000 to more than a million. After the fire at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (19-20 August 1794) he managed to obtain part of the stock and also made acquisitions from booksellers and in public sales. He went on to obtain complete libraries particularly in Italy. He carried on correspondence to acquire important private libraries for the Bibliothèque nationale such as those of Loménie de Brienne (1792), Panzer (1807), Count MacCarthy (1817). His role in the acquisition of collections, his long tenure at the library and his bibliographical knowledge resulted in him being often consulted about the older literature in the library. He had a particular interest in incunabula on vellum of which he compiled a bibliography. Among his acquisitions from booksellers Van Praet found many valuable works which he found it prudent to allocate to particular collections, such as books on vellum, incunabula, annotated editions, fine bindings, etc., so restabishing the concept of « réserve ». He bequeathed his private collection of vellum books to the library. His 53 years as librarian were fundamental in the development of the library. Van Praet was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres

Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres is a French learned society devoted to the humanities, founded in February 1663 as one of the five academies of the Institut de France.-History:...

 19 March 1830 and died in 1837.

Sources

• D. Varry
  Dominique Varry
  Dominique Varry is a French historian of books and professor of at École nationale supérieure des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques, part of the University of Lyon.-References:...
  
  , « Joseph Van Praet » in Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, vol III, Les Bibliothèques de la Révolution et du XIXe siècle 1789-1914, Paris, Promodis-Cercle de la librairie, 1991
• P.-C.-F. Daunou, Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. Van Praët, Paris, s.d. [1839]
• Nouvelle biographie française, vol. 40, Paris, 1862

• S. Balayé,La bibliothèque nationale des origines à 1800, Geneva, 1988
• J.-F. Foucaud, La bibliothèque royale sous la Monarchie de Juillet
  July Monarchy
  The July Monarchy , officially the Kingdom of France , was a period of liberal constitutional monarchy in France under King Louis-Philippe starting with the July Revolution of 1830 and ending with the Revolution of 1848...
  
  , Paris, 1978