What is an Atlas?
This book will provide an historical timeline and context for the atlas, as well as an assessment and comparison of its use between the Netherlands and the United States. Traditionally, the atlas has been a bound book of maps containing geographical information, but over time the use has broadened to that of a communication tool for presenting data and information in print and digital formats. The BBC documentary, The Beauty of Maps explained the atlas as a combination of “art and science along with topography, geography of a place and history represented in a beautiful form.” The atlas of the twenty-first century has evolved from the printed version of paper maps to an ever-expanding digital interpretation of the genre. The origin of the atlas began during the 15th–16th centuries, when the Dutch aesthetic virtually dominated the mapmaking and map printing industry by virtue of their own travels, trade ventures and widespread commercial networks. Mapmaking, or cartography, was brought into full richness during the Age of Discovery, and the Dutch Golden Age in particular. The atlases were elaborately decorated and ornamental with detail. The mapmakers saw this as an unprecedented opportunity to display their newly acquired knowledge of the world. The Netherlands in the early 16th century was a vibrant seaport. Explorers and sailors provided continuous new and vital information for the mapping of the world, and as an extension of that input, 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 Cosmographi
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