Dear colleague,

The great voyages of the fifteenth to the eighteenth century changed how Europe saw the world, and the books and maps made in their wake are how we still know them: from the Nuremberg Chronicle and Apian's Cosmographia to Benzoni's history of the New World, the great travel collections of Ramusio and De Bry, the atlases of Ortelius and the reports of Van Linschoten, together with the books of navigation, astronomy and cosmography that made the voyages possible. These are the works Frederik Muller Rare Books is devoted to.

The house carries the name of Frederik Muller (1817 to 1881), the Amsterdam bookseller and bibliographer whose catalogues of Americana and early voyages are still in use. In this first newsletter you will find some of the principal works now in the collection, our latest news and a selection from our Journal, where we write about the people and books behind the maps.

The whole collection, with photographs and full descriptions, can be seen on our website: www.frederikmuller-rarebooks.com

I would be glad to hear from you.

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.

Read the full news item

The Women Who Made the Maps
The history of cartography is usually told as a procession of men. Yet behind every printed map stood a workshop, and in those workshops women drew, engraved, coloured, …

The New World in Fifty Maps, 1561 to 1865
From Ruscelli's first maps of Brazil, Cuba and Hispaniola to the Republic of Texas and the Gadsden Purchase: the maps of the Americas on our shelves, read in the order …

Abraham Ortelius: The Man Who Bound the World
He began as a dealer who coloured maps by hand at the Frankfurt fair. In 1570 he gathered the whole world into a single book and changed how Europe saw the earth.