Readers are immediately confronted with four (well, really four and a half-we’ll get to the poor half in a minute) women in varying states of dress. These hand-colored atlases are perpetual favorites when we do rare book show’n’tell sessions, and the intrigue starts right from the title page. Left, the title page from the 1595 Antwerp edition right, the title page from the 1606 London edition. The Folger has two copies of Ortelius’s Theatrum: a 1595 edition printed in Antwerp and a 1606 edition printed in London. He even credited all of the people whose maps were used! He took existing maps from many known and notable cartographers and used them to fill his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which was first printed in Antwerp in 1570. Rather than attempt to create maps of all different parts of the world from scratch, Ortelius crowd-sourced. Nobody until an Antwerp map-colorist and seller 2 named Abraham Ortelius, who is now credited as being the first to put together a modern atlas. While there had been other bound collections of maps before 1570 (notably Ptolemy’s Geographia, which was reprinted with regularity), “nobody had taken the trouble to engrave to a uniform pattern a methodically selected spread of modern maps, and to market them with minimal text as a generically novel product.” 1 Ptolemy’s Geographia (seen here in 1513 Strasbourg edition) was frequently printed. Maps were often large, unwieldy things, designed to be hung on walls, or rolled up and stored in a traveling map cylinder. For people in the 16th and 17th centuries, geography and cartography were rapidly changing and expanding fields, as European knowledge of other parts of the world grew by leaps and bounds. Conventions that we don’t even know are conventions guide our understanding of maps. Many people learn to read and interpret them from an early age. We have them in our phones, on our public transit, on walls and signs everywhere you turn. Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).Maps, today, are ubiquitous. In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. In 1564 he completed his “ mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist.
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