Willem Pauwels, secretary to the city of Antwerp, made his bequest in 1481. The 41 volumes he donated were placed in the city hall in 1505, where they sat as the seed of what was meant to grow into a civic library. Then, in November 1576, mutinous Spanish soldiers torched the city hall during the rampage history calls the Spanish Fury, and the entire collection burned. The city began again. Christopher Plantin, who ran one of the most important printing houses in sixteenth-century Europe, started donating a copy of every book he printed, including the celebrated Biblia Polyglotta. A second collection grew up in parallel at the Antwerp seminary, curated by the humanist librarian Aubertus Miraeus, who in 1609 catalogued 356 works including 32 manuscripts under the title Bibliothecae Antverpianae Primordia. In 1617 the two libraries merged. The collection drifted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, parked in the trade house, then in the city hall's grim "pest room" where plague-prevention plans were drafted alongside the books.

The French period brought a fresh infusion. When Napoleon's administrators founded an Ecole Centrale in Antwerp in 1795, they assembled a library out of the works of suppressed monasteries, and when the school closed in 1802 many of those books stayed in city hands. The library opened to the public in 1805. The nineteenth century was its great expansion. Librarian Frans Henry Mertens, appointed in 1834, built the Dutch literature collection that still defines the library's identity. By the 1880s the books had outgrown the city hall, so the city bought the old seventeenth-century Jesuit sodality house on what was then called Jezuietenplein, opposite the Carolus Borromeus church. After a thorough renovation, the new library opened on 13 August 1883. On the day of the opening, the bronze statue of Hendrik Conscience was unveiled at the entrance, and the square was renamed Hendrik Conscienceplein. Conscience himself, by then full of honours and recognised across Flanders as the writer who had restored Dutch as a serious literary language, died just a few weeks later in September 1883.

Inside, behind the public reading room, lies the Nottebohmzaal, a room that looks like the platonic ideal of a heritage library: two-storey wooden galleries, leather spines, brass railings, busts of European authors gazing down on visitors who stop and forget to take photos. Oscar Nottebohm, a German-born businessman who became one of nineteenth-century Antwerp's most generous cultural patrons, left a substantial bequest in his will, and the room bears his name. It still functions as it was designed to function: a space for exhibitions, lectures, and the storage of the library's foremost treasures. Inside are an Egyptian cabinet, celestial and terrestrial globes made by Willem and Joan Blaeu in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, busts of authors who travelled here only in the form of their bindings. The room is sometimes used as a film set, and you may have seen it without knowing where it was.

In 2008 the institution officially renamed itself: no longer the City Library of Antwerp, but the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library. The change clarified its purpose. This is not a place to borrow a novel for the weekend; it is a repository, a conservation library, and you read its books in the reading room and leave them on the cart when you go. The collection holds more than a million volumes, focused on Dutch literature, Flemish history, the history of the Flemish Movement from its eighteenth-century pioneers to political devolution, Flemish folk culture, Flemish art, and a deep specialist collection called the Antverpiensia: anything ever written about Antwerp, anything ever printed in Antwerp, anything ever written by an Antwerper. The pre-1830 collection includes manuscripts dating to the tenth century, pamphlets, almanacs, emblem books, atlases, occasional poems printed for a single funeral and then forgotten by everyone except this library. It is, in a quiet way, the memory of how a language survived.