José Mindlin

José Mindlin: The Industrialist Who Gave Away a Library

When the Brazilian military dictatorship went looking for businessmen willing to cooperate with its repressive apparatus, it found almost everyone accommodating. Two men refused: Antônio Ermírio de Moraes and José Mindlin. The second of them ran a piston factory by day and spent eighty years assembling what became the largest private library in Latin America — and then gave it to a public university.

Odessa to São Paulo

José Ephim Mindlin was born on 8 September 1914 to Ukrainian Jewish parents from Odessa. His father, Ephim Mindlin, was a dentist; his mother was Fanny. He was, in other words, the child of the great migration of Eastern European Jews to Brazil in the years around the First World War, and he grew up in a São Paulo that was in the process of turning itself from a coffee entrepôt into the industrial capital of South America.

He graduated from the law school of the University of São Paulo and practised law for fifteen years. It was at law school that he met Guita Kauffmann; they married two years later. The partnership lasted until her death in 2006, produced four children and eleven grandchildren, and turned out to be the most consequential collaboration of his life, though not in a courtroom.

Metal Leve

Mindlin left the law to co-found Metal Leve, a manufacturer of pistons for automobile engines. He served as a director and presided over its expansion into a substantial international player in the auto parts industry — a Brazilian company competing in a sector dominated by German, American and Japanese incumbents, which in the mid-twentieth century was not a common outcome. In 1996, after the liberalisation of the Brazilian market exposed domestic manufacturers to full international competition, Metal Leve was sold to the German firm Mahle GmbH.

His conduct during the dictatorship is the part of the business record that matters most. In a period when accommodating the regime was the path of least resistance and considerable advantage, Mindlin and Ermírio de Moraes were the only two Brazilian businessmen who declined to assist its machinery of repression. It cost him nothing he ever complained about and it distinguished him permanently.

The Collection

The library was not a retirement project. Mindlin collected for more than eighty years, beginning as a boy — an early prize was a 1740 edition of Bossuet — and never stopping. He organised the holdings into four thematic sections: Brazilian affairs, general literature, art books, and volumes remarkable for their typography, layout, illustration or binding. The range is that of a man who loved books as objects and as evidence in equal measure: literature, history, travel narratives, historical and literary manuscripts, newspapers, maps, scientific works, textbooks, iconography and artists' books. He also acquired some 2,300 works from the collection of Rubens Borba de Moraes, the bibliophile and librarian he most admired.

Guita Mindlin was not a passive spouse to this obsession. She studied conservation formally in Brazil, France, Spain and Germany, set up a laboratory in their home for the care and repair of the books, and in 1988 co-founded the Brazilian Association of Bookbinding and Restoration. The collection survived in usable condition because she made it her professional business that it should.

The Gift

In 2002 Mindlin and Professor Istvan Jancsó of the University of São Paulo conceived a modern facility to house Brazil's most important collections. Four years later, in May 2006, the Mindlin family donated the entire collection to USP — described in the university's own account as a gesture of extreme generosity toward the nation. The portion catalogued at the university runs to roughly 32,200 titles in some 60,000 volumes, weighted heavily toward Brazilian studies.

The Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin opened to the public in 2013 as an organ of USP's Provost for Culture and Extension. Its building was designed by Eduardo de Almeida and Rodrigo Mindlin Loeb, taking its cues from Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris. That a Brazilian public university now holds, freely accessible, the primary documentary record of its own national culture is a direct consequence of one family's decision not to sell.

Public Life

Mindlin's other roles followed the same pattern of putting means at the service of scholarship. He edited Edusp, the University of São Paulo's publishing house, and sat on the Vitae Foundation. In June 2006 — the same year as the donation, and at the age of ninety-one — he was elected to the Academia Brasileira de Letras, taking chair 29. It is a rare industrialist who ends up among his country's men of letters by acclamation rather than endowment.

Why José Is Called a Genius

The word needs careful handling here, because Mindlin was not a scholar, a writer or an inventor. He wrote no important book and made no discovery. What he possessed, and what the record supports, is a very unusual combination of three capacities in one person: the industrial judgement to build a Brazilian engineering company into an international competitor; the bibliographic discernment, sustained across eight decades, to identify and secure the material that constitutes a national memory before anyone else understood its value; and the moral clarity to refuse a dictatorship and then to give away the fortune's most precious object rather than monetise it.

The honest counter-case is that each of these is admirable without being extraordinary in kind. Plenty of industrialists have built good companies; plenty of rich men have collected rare books; some have endowed libraries. Mindlin's collecting was made possible by industrial money, which is the ordinary condition of great private libraries and not a mark of intellectual distinction. If the claim is that he had a superior mind, the evidence is circumstantial. If the claim is that he exercised judgement of a rare order over a very long time, and then acted on it against his own financial interest, the evidence is overwhelming. The second claim is the true one, and it is not a lesser one.

Legacy

Mindlin died on 28 February 2010 of multiple organ failure, aged ninety-five, three years before the library that carries his and Guita's names opened its doors. He had spent his life on two things that rarely coexist — making machine parts and preserving manuscripts — and treated them as the same activity: building something durable in a country that had not been in the habit of expecting durability. The books are on public shelves in São Paulo, which is precisely where he wanted them.

Achievements

• Order of Cultural Merit (Brazil) — 1995
• Juca Pato Prize — 1998
• Educated at Law School, University of São Paulo