The present pair is one of only three known extant examples. The others are located at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (B.1.c.12); and the John Carter Brown Library. Burden II cites three known examples - JCB, Munich, and Vienna (the last two now missing), but with the following note to the corrigenda in Burden II that refers to the present pair of maps: 'A further example was discovered in 2003 bound inside an example of Ptolemaeus’s ‘Geographicae' published in Lyons in 1535. It now resides in a private American collection’ (Burden II vii). The two hemispheres appear to have been published for inclusion in a very small number of copies of the work. Yarmonlinksy (1937) traces just twenty-one known examples of the book; six undated, and fifteen dated.

There is no consensus as to whether the map is an integral part of the book, but only four copies (Vienna, Munich, Breslau, all of which are now missing; and John Carter Brown Library, Providence) of the twenty-one known of both issues include the map. To this we can add the present example of the maps, first recorded by Burden (1996) in the corrigenda to Burden II, and the example at the Bodleian noted by Shirley (2001).

Stobnicza’s world maps were derived from a famous wall map created by 

 (c. 1470–1520) in 1507, which was made for a new edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s '

'. This map was constructed using a partial and sub-spherical projection truncated at the poles, which, according to the historian Henry Harrisse, may be considered a precursor to Mercator’s 

First half of a pair of woodcut maps showing the west and east hemispheres of the world, watermarked with a stylized bull’s head with caduceus, with countermark of bull’s head surmounted by a cross.

Produced in Poland by the highly respected local cartographer Johannes Stobnicza, this map of the Eastern Hemisphere pairs with a second map of the Western Hemisphere forming a small, yet detailed view of the world based on part of 

's legendary wall map (1507).

The Stobnicza maps were the first to separate out the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, and were possibly originally included in his ‘Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographiam’ (Introduction to the Cosmography of Ptolemy) of 1512, one of the most important early writings on the Americas and contains several passages on Amerigo Vespucci and his discoveries. While they are very small and appear quite simple, closer inspection reveals wonderful details such as clouds, windheads, an elephant in southern Africa and a bird in Madagascar.

Stobnicza’s 'Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographiam' ('Introduction to the Cosmography of Ptolemy') of 1512 is one of the most important early writings on the Americas and contains several passages on Amerigo Vespucci and his discoveries. The work is notable for its early description of the Isthmus of Panama, seemingly a year before its official discovery by Núñez de Balboa. 

During the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Stobnicza’s maps experienced a resurgence of interest, specifically as to how such advanced maps came to be produced in Poland, well away from the centres of cartographic knowledge. In 1892, Henry Harrisse showed that Stobnicza was acquainted with the geographical work of the St Dié Gymnasium in Lorraine. In 1901, Joseph Fischer discovered the great twelve-sheet world map of 1507 by 

 and it became clear that Stobnicza had drawn from the two small insets at the top.

First half of an exceptionally rare pair of maps, one of only three known, based on insets from 

’s wall-map of the world (1507), itself known in only one example. In effect, the first separately printed map of the Eastern Hemisphere.

Stobnicza's Eastern Hemisphere