William Berry

Thomas Chubb, in his Printed Maps in the Atlases of Great Britain and Ireland, 1579-1870, describes Berry as a bookseller, geographer, and engraver, who was active between about 1670 and 1703. His most enduring partnership was with mapmaker Robert Morden (c1650-1703), and together they sold topographical works, prints, maps, charts and globes.

Berry was the son of a Warwickshire baker, probably apprenticed, with his future business partner Robert Morden (c1650-1703), to Joseph Moxon (1627-1691), an engraver, mapmaker, globe-maker and instrument-maker. In conjunction with Morden, Berry published A New Map of the English Plantations in America (1673), William Leybourn’s An introduction to astronomy and geography: being a plain and easie treatise of the globes (1675), and Playing cards depicting the Counties (1676). In 1677 they petitioned the Attorney General for ​“a licence to do all general and particular maps of the several parts of the world according to an alphabetical manner and method first projected by them against any other undertakers”. Although there are individual maps and globes prepared by the pair, the larger project never came to fruition. However, Berry is best remembered, as the “English Sanson”, for the set of maps of the world that he corrected and amended after Nicolas Sanson, which were issued separately between 1680 and 1689.