Antique Maps and Atlases Every Collector Should Know

The 1513 Strasbourg edition, with Martin Waldseemüller's modern maps Where map collecting from the age of print really starts. Ptolemy's second-century Geography was reprinted through the Renaissance, but this edition set the ancient maps apart from the modern ones, adding a Supplement of twenty new maps prepared by Waldseemüller and his colleagues, which earned it the title of first modern atlas. The woodcut maps have a stark, early look. The modern sheets, among them the Tabula Terre Nove devoted to the New World, show what Europe knew in the years after Columbus, and the Ptolemaic maps of the ancient world from the same book make a fine pairing, showing how the old geography and the new sat side by side.

A sound first map for a new collector. Münster's 1544 Cosmographia carried upwards of five hundred woodcuts, including 24 double-page maps. His maps grew out of his 1540 edition of Ptolemy's Geography, the first to give a set of separate maps of the four continents, and the America from that set, with Magellan's Victoria sailing across the Pacific, is the most famous sheet. Woodcut gives a bolder, chunkier line than the copper engravings that followed, which makes these maps easy to tell apart at a glance. Edition matters: the 1550 edition added many town views, and from 1588 the publisher swapped in new maps drawn from Ortelius, so check which generation of map you are being offered.

The book that set the pattern every later atlas followed: uniform, up-to-date maps bound in one volume with text. Ortelius published it in Antwerp in 1570 with 53 copper-engraved maps, most of them the work of Frans Hogenberg, and it grew to 167 maps in later versions. It was a commercial hit, with more than 7,300 copies printed in over 30 editions during Ortelius's lifetime, in Latin and then Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and English. That print run means single maps survive in good numbers, and the text printed on the back, in the language of its edition, helps place a loose sheet in its printing. The world map and the Americas are the famous sheets; regional maps of the Low Countries or Italy show the same fine engraving.

Civitates Orbis Terrarum, with Frans Hogenberg, 1572 to 1617 The city atlas that sat beside Ortelius on the shelf; contemporaries treated the two as companions. Braun compiled it and wrote the texts, Hogenberg was among its engravers, and the six volumes ended up with 543 views of 475 cities on 363 leaves. What collectors love is the foreground: little figures dressed in the local costume of each city, which turns a bird's-eye plan into a street scene. Pick a city that matters to you; the smaller German and Italian towns have the same charm as the famous views of London, Amsterdam or Venice.

Atlas of the counties of England and Wales, 1579 The foundation of English county mapping. Saxton began surveying in 1574, printed 34 county maps one by one until 1578, and issued them with a general map as an atlas in 1579, with Elizabeth I's portrait as the frontispiece and Thomas Seckford's arms on every map. This atlas formed the basis of county maps for more than a hundred years, so many later maps, Speed's among them, rest on Saxton's work. Saxton's plates were reissued long after his death with altered imprints and dates, so read the imprint to tell a first-generation sheet from a later printing; both are period maps, but they are not the same thing.

The most charming curiosity in early cartography, and proof that a map can be collected for its idea rather than its accuracy. In his 1581 Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae, Heinrich Bünting drew Europe, Asia and Africa as the three leaves of a clover with Jerusalem at the center, a device suggested by the arms of his home town, Hanover. England, Scandinavia and, in the lower left corner, America float outside the trefoil. It is a woodcut from a popular book that ran to many editions in German, Latin, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Czech and English, so examples survive in several languages. Ask which edition and language a copy comes from before agreeing on a price.

Spieghel der Zeevaerdt, Leiden, 1584 The first printed sea atlas in the world, published from Christoffel Plantijn's press in Leiden. Waghenaer finished the 23 charts for its first part around 1580, and a second part followed in 1585. A London edition, The Mariners Mirrour, appeared in 1588. These charts reward a slow look. Waghenaer pairs each coastal chart with a matching coastal profile, the outline of the shore as a pilot would see it from the sea, so each sheet works as both map and picture. They are working sailors' charts rather than maps of the land, and they suit a collector of maritime history best.

Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes, 1595, and the later Mercator-Hondius editions The book that gave every map collection its name. Mercator spent the last sixteen years of his life on it, and the final part was published the year after his death; his family completed the set, with some maps by his son Rumold and two grandsons. Many "Mercator" maps a collector meets come from the later editions issued by Jodocus Hondius and his heirs, who expanded the atlas and kept it in print for decades. Those are genuine period maps, but they are not the original Duisburg printing, and the two should not be confused, so check the text on the back and the imprint before buying.

The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, 1611 to 1612 The best-loved English county maps. Speed's manuscripts went to Amsterdam, where Jodocus Hondius engraved them on copper and sent proofs back to London for correction. The main title page is dated 1611, though the volume was finished in 1612. Speed added inset town plans, many of places never mapped before, making the Theatre the first collection of printed town plans of England and Wales. The plates stayed in use for generations, and each new publisher usually had the imprint re-engraved, so the name in the corner is your first dating clue. The Bassett & Chiswell edition of 1676 was the last complete one with both text and maps.

The North part of America, in Purchas his Pilgrimes, London, 1625 The map that set off one of cartography's great mistakes. Briggs's map of North America, engraved by Reynold Elstracke, shows California as an island, an idea Briggs credited to a Spanish chart and one that suited his case for a Northwest Passage. It is widely described as the first map to show the island, and the notion took hold among even the most sophisticated mapmakers. Father Kino disproved it in 1698, yet a royal decree was still needed in 1747 to change how cartographers drew the coast. That makes Briggs the cornerstone of a California-as-an-island collection, a specialty in its own right. The picture is a 1906 reproduction of the 1625 map.

Novi Belgii Novaeque Angliae, Amsterdam, about 1655 A key map for collectors of early America, because of its inset view of New Amsterdam: one of the earliest images of New York City, with the southern tip of Manhattan as a small settlement dominated by a Dutch fort. Visscher based the cartography on Jansson's map of 1651 and added the view. The map then formed the basis for the mapping of New England for nearly a hundred years and played a part in colonial boundary disputes. It went through several states, with place names and a privilege notice added over the years, so check which state a copy is. The picture shows a later state of about 1684.

The summit of the Dutch golden age of mapmaking. Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior, marketed from 1662 in several editions and languages, held nearly six hundred maps and thousands of pages of description, and kings and tsars wanted one. It was priced like the luxury it was: commonly given as 350 guilders uncolored and 450 colored, more than a craftsman's yearly income, though some accounts put the simplest edition at 250 guilders. The coloring was done by hand, and much of it by women and children paid to color the maps. Single Blaeu maps are among the most beautiful sheets a collector can frame, with crisp engraving and generous decorative cartouches. Look for period color laid on with restraint rather than a bright modern wash.

A completely different way of seeing a country, and the best choice for anyone who loves roads and travel. John Ogilby's Britannia of 1675 has 100 double pages of maps laid out as continuous strips, each following a major road or cross road across England and Wales like an unrolled scroll. It was the first time in England that an atlas was drawn on a uniform scale, one inch to a mile, and it is often called the first road atlas of its kind in western Europe. A single strip of the road to your own town is a satisfying, readable thing to own, and the format became the model for later strip road books such as Britannia Depicta of 1720.

A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain, the "Beaver Map," 1715 Named for its unforgettable vignette: dozens of beavers building a dam beside Niagara Falls, a scene Moll took from a wall map by Nicolas de Fer. The beaver stood for America, both for the fur trade and for sheer industry. Behind the decoration is a political map that rejects French claims to the Carolinas and shows the region under British control. It also marks a number of early colonial postal routes, which is why it is sometimes called the first American postal map. It went through several states over the following years, so read the imprint to tell a 1715 first state from a later printing.

Grosser Atlas, Nuremberg, first published 1716 The German atlas that carried decorative mapmaking deep into the eighteenth century. Homann's Grosser Atlas first appeared in 1716 with 117 maps and grew in later versions to 177 colored copperplate maps and plates, and after his death in 1724 his firm went on publishing as the Homann Heirs. Choose Homann for vivid hand color and elaborate allegorical cartouches, and for central European regions that the earlier Dutch atlases covered less closely. The title page styles him geographer to the Holy Roman Emperor, a sign of how official his maps were in their day. Because the firm reused plates for decades, a Homann Heirs imprint tells you a sheet was printed after Homann's death.

Often called the most important map in American history. John Mitchell's map of the British and French dominions in North America was published in London in February 1755, engraved on eight plates, and negotiators of the 1783 Treaty of Paris used it to mark the border between Canada and the United States. It remained a reference in boundary disputes into the twentieth century. This is a big, serious map for a collector of the founding era rather than a decorative piece. It went through several London editions, some in more than one issue, so get the edition identified before buying. Assembled as a wall map it is imposing; the separate sheets are a more manageable way in.