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 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.