Catalogues

Our latest catalogue offers a very select group of the earliest, the most important, and fiendishly rare, maps, atlases, and travel accounts, which are the first printed attempts by European commentators and adventurers, to depict their world, and the emerging outline of the Americas.

The William B. Ginsberg collection of World Maps; an epitome of the most beautiful, powerful, and influential cartographical images of the 15th and 16^th centuries. The earliest printed maps condensed and edited information from three “traditions” of map-making: Christian iconography, classical cartography, and contemporary charts. Ginsberg’s collection encapsulates the subtle metamorphosis of this amalgam of art and science, myth and metaphor, discovery and design, in nineteen maps: from the world map of the ‘Rudimentum novitiorum’ (1475), the earliest printed map, in magnificent original hand-colour; to the largest Italian world map published in the 16^th century, Giuseppe Rosaccio’s ‘Universale Descrittione di Tuto il Mondo’ (1657).