Introduction
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daniel crouch rare books
For our second catalogue, we are proud to present a selection of rare and important atlases, sea atlases, wall maps, manuscript maps, and voyages. The catalogue begins at sea in 1380, with a portolan chart fragment. Attributed to the Catalan chartmaker Guillem Soler, it is a rare example of a functional sea chart (i.e. one that was used aboard ship) from the fourteenth century. The portolan’s practical use would gradually be subsumed by the printed isolario, and then by the end of the sixteenth century by the printed sea-pilot. One of the pilot’s greatest exponents was the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, whose ‘Description de la Mer Mediterranee’ of 1609 (item 14), “set the standard for all future pilot guides” (Koeman). For the next century Barentsz’s countrymen provided the benchmark for the publication of pilot guides and sea atlases, reaching their apogee in the atlases produced by the van Keulen firm. Item 23 is a sumptuous example of the firm’s sea atlas output, here present in original full-wash colour. The following two centuries would see the emergence of Britain as the pre-eminent seafaring nation, with items such as Captain Williamson’s rare chart of St George’s Channel (item 27), Sayer’s pilots of the English Channel (item 30) and Atlantic (item 31), and Yeates’ fine chart of magnetic variation (item 42) bearing testament to her naval prowess. One should also mention the large chart of the Pacific (item 47), which was not only produced by the leading chartmaker of the day, William Norie, but also has a tantalizing link to Moby Dick. We continue our journey on dry land with a selection of early Ptolemaic atlases: from the 1490 Rome edition (item 2) bound for the library of Franz I of Austria and the Sylvanus edition of 1511 (item 4), one of the first examples of two-colour printing, to Martin Waldseemuller’s seminal ‘Geographiae’ of 1513 (item 5), “the most important of all the Ptolemy editions” (Streeter) and the atlas that would herald the birth of modern cartography. However, it would not be until the second half of the sixteenth century that the atlas would gain its modern form with the publication of Ortelius’s ‘Theatrum’ (item 13). Ortelius’s greatest rival in this endeavour was Gerard de Jode, whose rare ‘Speculum’ (item 10) is offered here in original hand-colour. The period would also see the publication of the first systematic atlas of city views (item 11) by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. This work, which was intended as a companion piece to Ortelius’s atlas, would be used as the template for the town books of the seventeenth century. Among them was Coronelli’s ‘Teatro delle Citta …’ (item 20), present here with the rare “Farnese borders”. The century also saw dominance of the Dutch in atlas production with the likes of Blaeu, who in 1630 published his first atlas (item 15), and Mercator-Hondius (item 16), offered here with English text. By the 1700s French, and notably German, atlas production began to encroach on the Dutch hegemony. There can be no better demonstration of this ascendancy than Johannes Baptist Homann’s ‘Grosser Atlas’, published in Nuremburg in 1745 (item 25).
catalogue II