The first piece he bought was a small terracotta ushabti. It was in 1969. Jordi Clos was nineteen years old and had few financial resources, but he spent three days insisting on the salesman at the Winter Palace in Luxor until he got it. He thrilled her so much that he slept with her. His hobby came from when he was a child: he did a project for school and read Sinuhé the Egyptian. He was fascinated by mummies, sarcophagi. As soon as he grew up in business and had the opportunity, he began collecting “out of pure passion.” He says that back then you could still buy at difficult prices. Today it is impossible, when “the market is the entire world, and the theme, so peculiar and beloved.”
He created the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona in 1994. It is part of the Fundació Arqueològica Clos and receives between five and six million visits. The main jewel of the library is Description de l’Égypte, the great encyclopedia that Napoleon commissioned from a hundred scientists – archaeologists, botanists, zoologists – and would give to the kings of Europe. There are few examples and they are poorly preserved, because the engravings are “of extraordinary perfection, in steel point on a plate,” and for years they were torn out to be framed. The 28 volumes of his, from 1820, are each in a drawer, in a piece of furniture that replicates the original where it was stored.
Clos acquired it in the early 2000s, after visiting countless antique shops. The museum was still on Rambla Catalunya and the library, which occupied the ground floor, was shaped like a circle. That’s why now, on València Street, the shelves are curved. They create segmented spaces, by themes and periods. In the double bottom are the novels; they consult little. The oldest book is that of Athanasius Kircher, a German polymath who in 1624 tried to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs (without being very successful). There are dossiers of excavations, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb: the original that Howard Carter dedicated to the Count of Gimeno, who translated it into Spanish.
Also documentation of the unearthing of the Sphinx of Giza, Deco drawings that dreamlike represent the life of Ramses, or an original by the archaeological landscape painter David Roberts, as well as a discarded project to save the temple of Abu Simbel. The catalogs of Sotheby’s, Christie’s or Bonhams, since 1910, reveal the origin and history of the pieces (who they belonged to, what price they had); The museum collects more than 1,300. Another floor brings together all the National Geographic copies, except for a dozen corresponding to the Second World War.
In Clos’s office, in addition to Helmut Newton’s Sumo, there are books related to his work. Founder of the Derby Collection, his twenty-three hotels have museum rooms in which he distributes the archaeological purchases he has made throughout his life; of pre-Columbian art, Roman mosaics, Greek tanagers. President of Turisme de Barcelona, ??as well as the Gremi d’Hotels, honorary consul of Lithuania, he has almost a thousand employees and a wall that traces his professional history in photos, since Pasqual Maragall commissioned him to draft the city’s strategic plan in the nineties ( then there were four million overnight stays) until now (twenty million). He appears with Pujol, Aznar, Samaranch, Felipe VI, Joan Clos, Hereu, with the chief of a Papua New Guinea tribe who had been a cannibal and asked him what he was doing with his enemies.
In the mornings he reads all the newspapers and reports he receives and when he gets home he continues reading about Egypt. If he does not read before going to sleep – even late after a party or event – ??he is unable to fall asleep. Reading relaxes you. Always on paper, he loves the smell of books, “it’s wonderful.” Now he is with Diary of a Librarian from Timbuktu, by Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, which the president of the Chamber, Josep Santacreu, gave him, and with The Daughter of the King of Egypt, by Georg Ebers, translated into Spanish in 1881 and which he already read ago. forty years. At 73, he continues doing ethnological expeditions and has been participating in archaeological excavations for two decades in the months of October, “the greatest adventure.” He says that those three weeks (without a mobile phone) he enjoys it like crazy.
