Posts from — February 2007

Historians in the Czech Republic at the Research Library in Olomouc have made a surprising discovery. While moving a safe containing rare documents to a new building, they found a seven-page nautical atlas that was hand-made by the Catalan cartographer Jaume Olives in 1563. The richly coloured parchment with gold and silver linings shows the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and the northern part of the Atlantic. Only five other copies of the atlas are known to exist in the world – in Barcelona, New York, Florence, Milan, and Valenciennes in France.

The library is currently putting it into digital format and we will be able to see it on their website in a couple of weeks.

It’s kind of adventurous [finding out] because we don’t know exactly why the atlas was made. But there is a special sign inside the atlas called Ex Libris and it’s a sign of the owner that tells us that the atlas was in the property of Wilhelm Brandt from Düsseldorf and he was a knight of the Kingdom of Hungary. But we don’t know how the atlas got to him. What we do know is that – after him – it was owned by the Moravian Monastery Louka close to the town of Znojmo. This is from where it came to our library sometime after 1784.

Dita Asiedu’s interview with library historian Petra Kuncova can be read on Radio Praha’s website.

[tags]Antique Atlas, Famous Cartographers, Antique Maps[/tags]

Librarians at Brown University’s John Hay Library recently unearthed a treasure trove of historic maps, many older than 400 years. Librarians knew there were some significant maps in the collection but, to date, had never cataloged them properly. Brown is in the middle of a project that will see many of the maps put online “for researchers”. No word if the collection will be viewable by the general public once they are online so, we can only hope!

An article in today’s Providence Journal states:

For most of us, a map is fairly straightforward blueprint, useful for getting from one place to another.

For a trio of Brown University librarians, though, a map is much grander: It is a historical and cultural object that tells us more about the mindset of the mapmaker and the society he or she lived in than anything related to mere geography.

The maps depict a number of geographic areas and illustrate the diversity of purposes maps can serve, including their role in various propoganda campaigns.

For more details, see the full article here.

The library, located in Providence, Rhode Island, is currently hosting an exhbit of a sampling of the maps from March 26 to April 25. The exhibit will be on display from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and is free and open to the public.

[tags]Antique maps, online map collections, Brown University, John Hay Library[/tags]

The Rucker Agee Map Collection, named to honor the original benefactor, contains nearly 700 images of regional and historical maps and atlases from the 16th through the 20th centuries from Birmingham Public Library’s collection of maps. Although the emphasis of the collection is on the U.S. State of Alabama, the historic maps depict the development of the region over centuries, and illustrate the evolution of cartography.

[tags]Antique Maps, Rucker Ageee, Alabama, Online Map Collections [/tags]

I have just been looking over some of the works of French naturalist and mineralogist Jean-Étienne Guettard that have been digitized and made available online by the University of Strasbourg. The maps, from his Atlas et description minéralogiques de la France (1780), begin on page 223. Be patient when downloading the detailed maps. It is very interesting to see how Guettard symbolized geology and illustrated cross-sections of Earth.

Via: The Map Room and BibliOdyssey.

[tags]Atlases, Minerology, Geology of France, Antique Maps[/tags]

But why a map collector and not a mapmaker? Who knows, but I did run across another interesting article about mapmaker Allen Carroll this past week in the Washington Post. Carroll shared map collector Richard Horwitz’s propensity for following routes on maps on family road trips as a child. Carroll, the National Geographic Society’s chief cartographer says he spent time looking at maps the way most kids read books and loving them, but never thought he could make a living making maps. The article sheds some light on the current state of mapmaking, but notes that even with the advent of the use of computers in cartography, mapmaking is still both an art and a science.

[tags]cartography, famous cartographers[/tags]

I see where Ephemera has an interview with road map collector and former president of the the Road Map Collectors Association, Richard Horwitz. It is always interesting to see how collectors of items not neccessarily of the mainstream get their start:

Horwitz: I was nine-years-old in 1951 when my father, a dentist in Chicago, asked me to pick up a bunch of maps he requested from the Sinclair Travel Bureau for our family drive to Florida. I remember being fascinated by the maps, and I loved following them as we drove the routes. I still have one of them–the map of Miami.

The full interview is available from Ephemera. 

[tags]road maps, collecting road maps, road map collectors association[/tags]