they depended on these very maps for their continued voyages. Binding the individual maps into a book format proved more suitable for travel, and provided more profits for the publishers. Among those first books of maps was the Theatre of the Round World, printed in the Netherlands in 1570 by the Flemish cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius. But it was several years later in 1595 that Gerard Mercator, colleague of Ortelius and also renowned as a cartographer and geographer, designated a bound book of maps as an ‘atlas’ in his posthumously published Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura. Mercator used the name Atlas in reference to the Greek mythical god and cosmologist Titan Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders, and was called the “holder of the cosmos.” Shortly after Mercator’s death, the copper printing plates for his atlases were sold, but publication continued for many years and ten editions, and now included the name of the publisher, the Mercator-Hondius Atlas. The use of the name Atlas was used so frequently in many publications, that it was no longer considered a proper name, but had become synonymous as a metaphor for a book of maps, and by the end of the 17th century it had become widely accepted as the generic term. Dr. Peter van der Krogt, preeminent Dutch scholar and historian of the atlas at the University of Amsterdam, explained the atlas with a traditional definition as “a systematic, cohesive collection of maps, usually published in printed book form, which represents a certain geographic area and deals with one or several geographical phenomena.” He asserted that “an atlas is defined as a book with maps” in which maps are the main medium of information, and where the accompanying texts must repeat or complete the same information in words,” and further explained: a collection of printed maps in book form or bound similar to a book with a printed title page; in cases where text is included, the publisher’s intention to give the dominance of graphic elements (particularly maps,
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