The Lotter and Lobeck pocket atlas with Lobeck's Kurzgefasste Geographie, here enlarged with 14 extra maps of Germany to 43 maps in contemporary colour.
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Contents: Engraved frontispiece and title, 43 engraved maps in contemporary colour (the 29 of the index plus 14 added maps of Germany), engraved index, 72 pp. Kurzgefasste Geographie
Format: Two parts in one volume, oblong octavo, 110 x 137 mm
Colour: Contemporary hand colour
Binding: Contemporary blind-tooled leather
Provenance: Deaccession stamp of an old monastic library
Engraved frontispiece, engraved title, 43 engraved maps in contemporary colour, engraved index of the 29 atlas maps with a manuscript list of the 14 added maps on the verso, 72 pp. including the printed title of the Kurzgefasste Geographie. Maps numbered in manuscript I-XXI, 1-14, XXII-XXIX. In all 45 double-page engraved plates (according to the seller's description).
Contemporary blind-tooled leather. Deaccession stamp of an old monastic library on the verso of the frontispiece and on the engraved title. Lightly yellowed, with light foxing in places.
Shirley, Maps in the Atlases of the British Library, T.LOT-1a (29 maps).
Pagliani, Atlas minor, 43.
Phillips 630.
Cf. King, Miniature Antique Maps, 1744 (online).
Small atlases for the pocket were a speciality of eighteenth-century Augsburg, and this one by the engraver Tobias Conrad Lotter and Tobias Lobeck is among the most attractive. The engraved frontispiece and title, by Lobeck after designs by Gottfried Eichler, set the tone; the maps themselves, engraved by Lotter after Lobeck's drawings, cover the world in two hemispheres, the heavens, the four continents and the countries and regions of Europe, many with decorative cartouches. The map of America shows the northern part of the continent still incomplete, as much of it was unexplored, and the map of Asia includes the northern coast of Australia.
The atlas was issued with and without Lobeck's pocket geography, the Kurzgefasste Geographie, which was printed in turn by Brinhauser, Johann Michael Wagner and Johann Michael Spaeth. This copy has the geography in Spaeth's printing, which mentions the destruction of Lima in 1746 and dates from after Wagner's death in 1758. In this copy 14 additional maps of Germany are bound in after map XXI and listed by hand on the verso of the index, so that the atlas now holds 43 maps instead of the 29 called for, all in contemporary colour.
A charming example of the Augsburg pocket atlas, enlarged with additional maps of Germany and preserved in its original colour and binding.
Old monastic library (deaccession stamp).