Cosmographia (Sebastian Münster)

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.