New acquisition: Montanus's America, Amsterdam 1671, the first edition in its first issue
We are pleased to announce the acquisition of a complete copy of Arnoldus Montanus, De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld: of Beschryving van America en 't Zuid-Land, printed at Amsterdam by Jacob van Meurs in 1671. It is the first edition in its first issue, distinguished by the portrait of Joan Maurits, Prince of Nassau, which was dropped from later issues.
This is the most ambitious Dutch book on the Americas of the seventeenth century, and the copy has been collated leaf by leaf and is complete. It contains the large folding map, Novissima et Accuratissima Totius Americae Descriptio per Jacobum Meursium, fifteen double-page maps after Joan Blaeu from Virginia and Bermuda to Peru, Chile and Magellanica, thirty-two double-page plates of which two are folding, seven engraved portraits and a great number of engravings worked into the text.
The plates are what make the book. Ten of them record Dutch Brazil under Johan Maurits: the panorama of Mauritiopolis, the harbour of Olinda, the forts lettered along the Bay of All Saints, the mouth of the Paraiba, the Fluvius Grandis, Siara, Alagoa ad Austrum, the siege of Porto Calvo, Arx Nassovii and Arx Principis Guilielmi. They rest on drawings made in the field in the 1630s and 1640s by the painters and draughtsmen Johan Maurits took with him to Pernambuco, among them Frans Post and Zacharias Wagener. Alongside them stand Havana, Cusco, Potosi, Cartagena, Acapulco, Angra on Terceira and Santo Domingo, so that the book amounts to a survey of the cities of the Americas as Europe saw them in 1671.
The volume is in its contemporary vellum binding over boards, with a blind-stamped armorial medallion on both covers, the leaves measuring 31 by 21 cm, and the impressions of the plates are unusually dark and sharp.
Bound in with the preliminaries is the extract from the privilege granted to Jacob van Meurs by the States of Holland and West Friesland on 28 July 1670 and signed by Johan de Witt, giving him fifteen years of sole right to the work in any language.