New this autumn: an uncut Reisch sheet, Renaissance science and maps from the Caert-Thresoor of 1598
Many of the works that have joined the collection in recent weeks share a common thread. They are books and maps made to carry knowledge of the world beyond the scholar's study: an encyclopaedia for students, a vernacular commentary on the standard textbook of astronomy, a small atlas for the general reader, and printed accounts of voyages for a public eager for news from the East. Several of them also complete stories that other works in our collection begin.
A sheet that was never cut
The most unusual arrival is a printed sheet from the Basel edition of Gregor Reisch's Margarita Philosophica, printed by Sebastian Henricpetri in 1583. Reisch's encyclopaedia of the liberal arts, first published in 1503, contained two large woodcut plates that folded out of the book: a world map and a table of music theory. On this sheet the two are still printed side by side, never divided and never bound, and the instruction to the binder, "Hanc tabulam refer ad folium 364", shows where the music table was meant to go. Such a sheet lets one see a book before it became a book.
The world map, of the type of Peter Apian and Gemma Frisius, already names America, Peru and the Strait of Magellan. The music table sets out the Greek tone system against the hexachord syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. In the collection the sheet stands beside the Strasbourg edition of the Margarita Philosophica of 1512, with its folding world map in contemporary colour, and beside Apian's Cosmographia as revised by Gemma Frisius, Antwerp 1533, with all four volvelles.
Astronomy and mathematics
Sacrobosco's De sphaera was the textbook from which Europe learned astronomy for three centuries. Mauro Fiorentino's Annotationi sopra la Spera del Sacro Bosco, Florence 1550, presents it in Italian, with a literal translation, a commentary and 108 woodcuts. The author was a Servite friar in Florence, the book is dedicated to Duke Cosimo I, and it was printed by the ducal printer Lorenzo Torrentino, who came from the Low Countries. Our copy carries two early Italian annotations. It joins a Latin edition of the same text, Sacrobosco's Sphere with the commentary of Pedro Ciruelo, 1526.
From the eighteenth century comes Adriaan Vlacq's trigonometric and logarithmic tables in the edition of Jacques Ozanam, Paris 1720. This copy has a history of its own: in 1799 it was presented as a prize for the study of arithmetic before the administrators of the French département of the Nièvre, and the inscription, seal and signatures are on a flyleaf. The copy also has two pages of manuscript corrections to the tables.
Two maps by Matthäus Seutter
The Augsburg publisher Matthäus Seutter made both ornamental and topical maps, and two new arrivals show each kind. His wind chart is a compass rose of thirty-two points with the names of the winds in seven languages, surrounded by wind heads and the four seasons, in contemporary colour. His map of the war on the Don and the Dnieper reported a current campaign: the Russian advance of 1736 against the Crimean Tatars and the Ottomans, with the lower Dnieper, the Sea of Azov and the Crimea, framed by printed German reports of the operations.
The Americas
Several maps document the Americas at moments of change. Sauthier's map of New York and New Jersey appeared in Matthäus Lotter's Augsburg edition in 1777, in the first years of the American Revolution. Morris Birkbeck's map of the Old Northwest, London 1818, shows the region two years before Illinois became a state. From the Spanish Hydrographic Office comes Bernardo de Orta's chart of the harbour of Veracruz, Madrid 1798. Ackermann's bilingual plan of Buenos Aires, c. 1824-1826, is dedicated to Bernardino Rivadavia as Envoy Extraordinary to the Court of Great Britain, and the plan of Querétaro records the siege of 1867, with the lines of Maximilian's army and of its besiegers.
English voyages to the East Indies
Three accounts from Pieter van der Aa's Dutch collection of voyages, Leiden 1706, follow the earliest English ventures to the East Indies: Benjamin Wood's voyage of 1596, from which no one returned; the first voyage of the English East India Company under James Lancaster, 1601-1603, with its folding map; and John Saris's journal of his years at Bantam, 1605-1609. They read well beside the first English edition of Van Linschoten's Itinerario, London 1598, which gave English readers the Portuguese knowledge of the route to the Indies only a few years before Lancaster sailed.
Maps from the Caert-Thresoor of 1598
More than thirty small maps from the first edition of Barent Langenes's Caert-Thresoor, Middelburg 1598, have joined the collection, each with its Dutch description on the back, among them the world, America, South America, the Caribbean, Java and the East Indies. Engraved by Pieter van den Keere and Jodocus Hondius in an oblong format meant to be cheaper and handier than the great folio atlases, the Caert-Thresoor appeared a year after the first Dutch fleet had returned from the East Indies. Its plates were reused for the Latin edition of Petrus Bertius from 1600 and for a French edition of 1602, so the Dutch text of 1598 is their earliest form. Ortelius himself is represented in the collection in both formats: by the last edition of his great Theatrum, Antwerp 1641, and by the first French edition of his pocket atlas, the Epitome du theatre du monde, Antwerp 1588, a small-format Ortelius that preceded the Caert-Thresoor by a decade.
Further additions
Also new are Levinus Hulsius's chart of the South Atlantic, 1602; two large woodcut town views from Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia, Colmar and Besançon, the latter bearing the monogram of the Bern artist Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch; Janssonius's map of the kingdoms of Granada and Murcia; and an English map of Greenland of the early eighteenth century that marks where the Danish navigator Jens Munk wintered in Hudson Bay in 1619-1620.
We are glad to send further images or a full description of any of these works.