The Worst Excess of Tulipomania
In time, however, the collector did sell one bulb, only to discover that, when it was lifted from the ground, it had two offsets. By this means, Semper Augustus gradually became available, even though, by the time the market collapsed, the number of bulbs probably never was much greater than it had been originally.
Because Semper Augustus was scarce, it was coveted and because it was desirable, it was expensive. That rarity was reflected in the price, 1,000, 1,200, 2,000 guilders all having been quoted for a single bulb. In 1633, one was said to have sold for 5,500 guilders; in 1637, just before the crash, a price of 10,000 guilders was asked, an exorbitant amount that would have purchased a grand home on the most fashionable canal in Amsterdam.
…
The basic unit of currency in the Dutch Republic was the guilder, denoted by fl (florin), which, in 1638, had a gold content of 0.77 grams. The Semper Augustus that purportedly sold for 5,500 guilders, therefore, would have had an equivalent weight in gold equal to $67,225 (evaluated at $450 per ounce), and this at a time when the purchasing power would have been much greater. Although it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons between monetary values in the Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth-century and the present, salaries and prices do provide one means. The annual earnings of a carpenter or cloth shearer, for example, were about 250 fl, a well-to-do merchant might earn from 1,500 to 3,000 fl a year. Clusius, while at the University of Leiden, had an annual salary of 750 fl a year, and the fee charged by Rembrandt for his imposing masterpiece The Night Watch (1642) was 1,600 fl.
We recommend Mike Dash’s book, Tulipomania : The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused and 
July 10th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
There’s a charming detail, which Pavord doesn’t mention. The professor of anatomy in Rembrandt’s ‘The anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp’ (Mauritshuis, the Hague) is, clearly, called dr. Tulip. Born Claes (Nicholas) Pietersz. (Pieters-son), he graduated at Leyden University, latinized his name to Nicolaus Petreius, and set up a practice in Amsterdam. As houses didn’t have numbers, at the time, people hung a sign on their doors, to distinguish one Claes from another. Pietersz chose a tulip, a fitting item, since he was a doctor and therefor people assumed he was up to date in modern botany, and possibly dabbled in gardening himself. The tulip on his house eventually stuck to his name. When Pietersz was elected to the city council, he chose the tulip for his seal and signet ring. When tulipomania emerged, the good doctor removed the tulip from his house - he was a staunch orthodox calvinist, and would have disapproved strongly of the madness of it - but too late: he was known, to this day, as Dr. Tulp.
February 8th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Michael Pollan’s great book The Botany of Desire, has a large chapter on tulipomania.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
I didn’t think The Botany of Desire was a great book. It’s written too much like a series of long magazine articles, struggling to find a story in the subject, instead of letting the subject tell it’s own tale. It didn’t live up to its own premise of being history from the plant’s view, which for me was the primary attraction to the title in the first place. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, the condemned protagonist spends much of his tme reading the greatest novel his culture had ever produced, a fictional autobiography of an oak that had lived one thousand years.