Items16The creator’s order
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Geography (Ptolemy)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…0 - 2
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,…0 - 3
Theatrum Orbis TerrarumThe 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,…0 - 4
Georg BraunCivitates 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…0 - 5
Christopher SaxtonAtlas 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…0 - 6
Bünting cloverleaf mapThe 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…0 - 7
Lucas Janszoon WaghenaerSpieghel 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…0 - 8
Gerardus MercatorAtlas 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…0 - 9
John SpeedThe 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…0 - 10
Henry Briggs (mathematician)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…0
