The scarce English edition of the Mercator/Hondius atlas in original colour
Atlas or A Geographicke description of the Regions. Counties and Kingdoms of the world,
through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, represented by New & Exact Maps. Translated by Henry Hexham, Quarter-master to the Regiment of Colonell Goring.
Amsterdam,
Henry Hondius and John Iohnson,
Anno 1636 - 1638.
Two volumes, folio (515 by 330mm), engraved title-pages, with letterpress overslips over both titles and the imprint of volume one, and double-page engraved portrait of Mercator and Hondius, with contemporary hand-colour in full and heightened with silver, 196 double-page engraved maps in fine contemporary outline hand-colour, contemporary Oxford mauve morocco, with gilt panels and floral corner-pieces and central arabesque, spines decorated with gilt lozenges in ten compartments with nine raised bands, all edges gilt, original marbled pastedowns.
15140
notes:
The English edition of the Mercator-Hondius 'Atlas' contained some twenty new maps: eight in the first volume and twelve in the second. This dramatic revision was "greater than in any of the former editions of the atlas" (Koeman).
Mercator's maps of England, Scotland, and Ireland have been corrected and improved with new vignettes, and several others bear the imprint of Henricus Hondius. In the second volume, one can see the rise of Janssonius within the publish...
Mercator's maps of England, Scotland, and Ireland have been corrected and improved with new vignettes, and several others bear the imprint of Henricus Hondius. In the second volume, one can see the rise of Janssonius within the publish...
bibliography:
Koeman II, Me 41A and 41B (v2); van der Krogt 1:341.1a and 1:341.2B.
provenance:
Full of “non descript” natural history
Sydney’s CBD
9d. for a gig drawn by two horses to 1/4d. for a sheep, pig or goat
An early map of NSW with landowners names
One of the earliest maps of Sydney
The first official account of the first European settlement in Australia
The beginnings of the suburbanisation of Sydney 








