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).

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 Commonwealth of Dominica. The Nature Island. Wai’tu kubuli, which, in the language of the indigenous Kalinago Indians, translates as ‘Tall is her body’. This collection, assembled over two generations, portrays Dominica through one hundred maps, prints, books, manuscripts, and ephemera.

If journalism is, as they say, the first draft of history, then perhaps photography is the raw material of memory; in the sense not just of personal mementoes (though that’s often the way photographs start out), but also of shared recollection. And that sort of collective remembering is, in turn, the stuff of history’s sister, culture, and of identity.