The Sunderland Collection

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William Hole’s allegorical county maps for Drayton’s 

 transform poetry into cartography, personifying rivers, hills, and towns as vivid figures within a living landscape. These intricate engravings fuse topography and myth to visually represent Michael Drayton’s poetic vision of England.

Drayton's Poly Olbion

Von Reilly’s Atlas of the Moral World reimagines geography as a landscape of virtues and vices. Its witty, allegorical maps translate moral philosophy into spatial form, turning ethical reflection into an entertaining journey across an imagined moral landscape.

Reilly's Atlas of the Moral World

Issued as a student’s companion, Murray’s Small Classical Atlas included in its map of Italy the Umbrian town now called Narni. In the atlas it appeared under its Latin name, ‘Narnia’, which provided C. S. Lewis with the name for his fantasy realm.

Murray's Small Classical Atlas

 includes seven woodcut maps based on Antonio Manetti’s geometric reconstruction of Hell, transforming Dante’s poetic allegory into measurable Renaissance space. These diagrams visualise the infernal descent as a conical pit beneath Jerusalem, blending theology, mathematics, and early cartography.

Dante's Inferno

 give tangible form to the imagined island commonwealth, combining Renaissance travel imagery with philosophical speculation. Their schematic coasts and harbours translate conceptual satire into coherent geography.

Thomas More's Utopia

The famous frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan, designed by Abraham Bosse, depicts the sovereign as a vast human amalgamation of the body politic. The city and landscape below form a symbolic cartography of order, uniting civil and ecclesiastical estates under the benign oversight of one ruler.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan

Maps in Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America documented the conflicts, intrigues, and piratical locations of the Caribbean, turning firsthand reportage into the geography of legend. The book’s atmospheric engravings fixed the visual language of piracy that still endures in popular culture.

Exquemelin’s Bucaniers of America

Herman Moll’s charts in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe lend empirical realism to the castaway’s adventures, blending imaginative narrative with Enlightenment cartography.

Moll’s Maps in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels includes a small map of Japan and ‘Parts Unknown’, locating Swift’s flights of fantasy andGulliver’s absurd voyages within a recognisable geography. The chart literalises the satire’s conceit, placing imaginary islands at the periphery of Enlightenment knowledge.

Gulliver's Travels

Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum features a fold‑out map of the subterranean world, centred on an inner sun and its orbiting lands. The chart visualises a hollow‑earth cosmos, lending a pseudoscientific imprimatur to its satire and fantasy.

Niels Klim’s Underground Travels by Ludvig Holberg

Lionel Charlton’s antiquarian history of Whitby documents the town and its abbey through local records, topographical description, and early historical research. Its evocation of Whitby’s dramatic coastal landscape and ruined abbey would later lend the setting a powerful literary afterlife in Bram Stoker’s 

The History of Whitby and Whitby Abbey

The 1780 Royal Spanish Academy edition of Don Quixote introduced a large folding map tracing the knight’s journeys through Spain. Compiled by Tomás López, it imbues Cervantes’s picaresque wanderings with an Enlightenment cartographic verisimilitude.

Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote

 incorporated maps of the Bounty’s voyage and his 3,600‑mile open‑boat journey, serving as both a record of his adventure and evidence for his vindication. The routes he plots across the Pacific went on to inform and shape the romantic literature of adventure on the high seas.

William Bligh's Mutiny on the Bounty

Mungo Park’s celebrated account of his West African expeditions was published with engraved maps by the eminent geographer James Rennell, illustrating regions then largely unknown to Europeans. One of these maps introduced the legendary Mountains of Kong – a vast range that appeared in atlases for more than a century despite never having existed outside the assumptions and imaginations of cartographers.

Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior of Africa

Bory’s conjectural reconstruction of the Atlantis appears in his 

Essais sur les Isles Fortunées et l’antique Atlantide

 (1803). Instead of the open Atlantic facing what is now Western Sahara, the map shows a vast landmass mirroring the west coast of Africa and nearly meeting it in a narrow strait near modern-day Cabo Bojador. Bory attempts to demonstrate that the Atlantic archipelagos were originally the elevated regions of Atlantis, now surviving as island-fragments of the lost continent.

Bory's Map of Atlantis

 introduced the aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven, establishing many of the tropes that would later shape Bram Stoker’s

 and modern vampire fiction. Moving from fashionable London society to Italy and Greece, the story draws on regional vampire traditions while playing on contemporary contrasts between Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the perceived superstition of Europe’s rural margins.

John William Polidori's The Vampyre

Gladstone’s Studies on Homer includes a folding map reconstructing the ancient Mediterranean world of the Iliad and Odyssey. The chart visualises Homeric geography as both real and imagined, linking classical scholarship with the empirical rigour of Victorian cartography.

Gladstone's Studies on Homer

, dozens of engraved maps accompany the tales, many drawn from the author’s own sketches. These maps integrate scientific precision with imaginative speculation, making real geography an engine of narrative fabulation.

Jules Verne's Les Voyages Extraordinaires

 contains the famous ‘Bellman’s Map’. Purporting to be an ocean chart, it is in fact ‘a perfect and absolute blank’, a conceit that gently mocks cartographic authority while anticipating later discourse on representation and meaning.

Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark

In this influential study, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli presented some of the earliest detailed maps of the surface of Mars, based on his observations during the great opposition of 1877. His charts – identifying seas, continents, and the famous canali (later mistranslated as ‘canals’) – fuelled scientific speculation and helped inspire later visions of an inhabited Mars in science fiction.

Schiaparelli's Mars Canals

 was Stevenson’s starting point, the image from which the entire novel grew. Its ports, capes, and the famous red cross marking the treasure helped establish the adventure map as both plot device and symbol of imaginative quest.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

Abbott’s Flatland uses geometric diagrams as maps of its two‑dimensional world, where social order and perception are defined by strict spatial limitation. The illustrations chart a society confined to a plane and unable to conceive of higher dimensions, provoking questions about the limits of our own perception.

Edwin Abbott's Flatland

The folding map frontispiece to Kidnapped charts David Balfour’s wanderings across the Scottish Highlands. It anchors Stevenson’s tale of survival and identity in a vividly realised and romantic national geography.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped

John Uri Lloyd’s occult novel Etidorhpa includes a cross-sectional map tracing the narrator’s descent through the Earth’s strata. This diagram converts the mystical journey into a pseudo-scientific itinerary, mapping the visionary and spiritual as a subterranean geography.

Lloyd's Etidorhpa

The first printed map of Hardy’s fictional Wessex appeared with

, a paratextual conceit that soon took on a cultural reality of its own. Overlaying actual and invented towns, the map raises interesting questions about what we mean when we call a literary landscape ‘real’.

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure

 introduced what is often regarded as the first wholly invented fantasy map. Its chart of rivers, cities, and battlefields anchors romance in a self-contained secondary world, anticipating Tolkien and modern epic fantasy.

William Morris's The Sundering Flood

The trade edition retained Morris’s map of the imagined land, reinforcing its role as visual prologue to the story and establishing a still-thriving tradition in epic fantasy publishing and world building.

Trade Edition of The Sundering Flood

Erskine Childers’ pioneering espionage novel follows two yachtsmen as they uncover a German invasion plot while sailing the treacherous sandbanks and channels of the North Sea coast. The novel’s foldout maps of the Frisian Islands and surrounding waters are integral to the narrative, with the shifting maritime landscape and unstable geography becoming a source of suspense.

Erskine Childers' Riddle of the Sands

Arthur Rackham’s map of Kensington Gardens charts a hybrid of real London landmarks and fairy-tale wonder. It grounds Barrie’s whimsy in the mundane, turning the quotidian city park into a liminal world of memory and magic.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World recounts Professor Challenger’s expedition to a remote South American plateau where prehistoric creatures survive in isolation. Sketch maps – presented as rough field drawings – trace the route to the plateau and the newly discovered ‘Maple White Land’, lending the adventure a sense of documentary realism.

Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World'

 re-orients the land with Munchkin Country at the top, a playful cartographic inversion. It reflects Baum’s expanding fantasy empire, treating Oz as a mutable, though still mappable, world.

L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz

Sleigh’s companion pamphlet explains the Anciente Map, identifying its forests, castles, and borders between mythic kingdoms. It functions as both commentary and gazetteer, extending literary cartography into playful pseudo-scholarship.

Guide to Sleigh's Faerie-Land

Johnny Gruelle’s children’s fantasy The Magical Land of Noom follows two siblings who accidentally fly to a fantastical realm on the far side of the Moon. The book’s illustrated endpaper map presents Noom as a lively pictorial landscape filled with whimsical locations and brief narrative notes, blending cartography with storytelling in the exuberant style of early twentieth-century children’s illustration.

Gruelle's Magical Land of Noom

 (1925) by Lance Sieveking imagines the rediscovery of a surviving Atlantis, inhabited by an advanced, isolated civilisation. Its map shows us an archipelago concealed in the Atlantic by fog and dangerous whirlpools. It is one of several British novels of the period exploring the theme.

The Ultimate Island

 sets out his theory that an advanced prehistoric civilisation once occupied a vast continent in the Pacific Ocean. Its maps give geographical form and apparent scientific authority to a speculative history that proved influential in occult, pseudo-historical and popular-fiction traditions.

Churchward's Lost Continent of Mu

Conrad’s travel diary includes rough charts tracing his Congo route, later recast as fiction in Heart of Darkness. These maps situate literary myth within colonial geography, the river’s meanderinto the unknown, resonating with the protagonist’s psychological and moral descent.

Joseph Conrad’s Diary of His Journey Up the Congo

 (1927) brings together three competing maps of Barsetshire: Trollope’s own long-lost sketch and later reconstructions by devoted readers Ronald Knox and Spencer van Bokkelen Nichols. Such attempts to map, reconcile, and physically explore an imagined world anticipate forms of participatory engagement now more commonly associated with fantasy fiction, video and role-playing games, and other popular media.

Trollope: A Commentary

Issued as a decorative print, Rex Whistler’s map offers a playful cartographic interpretation of one of Swift’s satirical realms. Like the text, it toys with scale and perspective, provoking astonishment and wonder.

This limited edition reproduces Rex Whistler’s celebrated engravings for Gulliver’s Travels, first commissioned by the Cresset Press in 1930. The suite of illustrations, noted for their wit and elegance, exemplify Whistler’s gift for combining eighteenth century pastiche with modern surreal playfulness. The present edition, restricted to just 25 sets, is distinguished by the inclusion of an original copperplate used in printing the maps and illustrations.

Rex Whistler (1905–1944) was one of the most brilliant illustrators and muralists of his generation, whose career was cut short by his death in Normandy during the Second World War. He has been described as ‘a serious and permanent artist, unique in vision and unique in expression.’ His engravings for Gulliver’s Travels are cited as being among his finest achievements, as well as of twentieth-century book illustration generally.

Rex Whistler's Gulliver's Travels

Robert E. Howard’s The Hyborian Age (1938) includes the author’s own sketch map of the prehistoric world inhabited by Conan the Cimmerian. Conceived as a pseudo-historical framework for his sword-and-sorcery tales, the map anchors Howard’s imagined civilizations within a distorted prehistoric geography loosely based on Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Robert E. Howard’s The Hyborian Age

Saint-Exupéry’s little prince travels between planets too small for maps, yet the book’s frontispiece chart of stars suggests a child’s cosmic itinerary.

The World of Le Petit Prince

Lovecraft’s hand-drawn map of Arkham, included in Marginalia, offers a glimpse into the physical layout of his sinister and storied fictional city. Though rough and utilitarian, it laid the groundwork for decades of more polished iterations and remains a touchstone for visualising ‘Lovecraft Country’.

H. P. Lovecraft's Marginalia

The map of Moominvalley situates Tove Jansson’s whimsical creatures within a romantic Nordic landscape, where rivers, mountains, and a distant lighthouse ground the fantastical in the familiar.

A Map of Moominvalley

The maps of Narnia, from Pauline Baynes’s early designs onward, provide a visual throughline for the saga. Their medieval compass roses and decorative borders subtly echo the moral allegory embedded within its fantastical world.

The Chronicles of Narnia

This pictorial allegorical map by Wolfgang Felten transforms the world of music into a whimsical seascape of imaginary islands and waters associated with composers, genres, and performance traditions. Issued by Heimeran Verlag in Munich, it forms part of a mid-century series of decorative thematic maps that reimagine cultural fields as navigable territories.

Map of the Sea of Musical Notes

Written by C. S. Forester as a retrospective guide to his celebrated naval hero, The Hornblower Companion includes a series of maps by Samuel H. Bryant charting the maritime theatres of Hornblower’s adventures during the Napoleonic Wars. These maps transform the historical seas of the Atlantic and Mediterranean into a coherent narrative geography, tracing the movements of a fictional sailor whose influence would extend far beyond historical fiction – including, famously, as an inspiration for Star Trek.

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The Hornblower Companion

First published in 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea follows the young mage Ged as he learns to master his powers and confront the shadow he has unleashed. Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, mythic prose and Ruth Robbins’s frontispiece map together evoke a vividly realised archipelago steeped in wonder, danger, and ancient lore.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Map of Earthsea

The first edition of Richard Adams’s Watership Down includes a folding map by Marilyn Hemmett tracing the rabbits’ journey from Sandleford across a recognisable Hampshire landscape to their new home on the Down. Presented with Ordnance Survey–like gridlines and real geographical references, the map grounds Adams’s animal fable in a precise and convincing topography.

Richard Adams's Watership Down

This scholarly volume on F. Scott Fitzgerald includes endpaper maps depicting the geography of The Great Gatsby. By translating Fitzgerald’s symbolic landscape – East Egg, West Egg, Manhattan, and the Valley of Ashes – into explicit cartographic form, the maps highlight the novel’s underlying structure of class division and moral geography.

Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

This illustrated Penguin edition of Watership Down reproduces the novel’s map in a redrawn and reoriented form, making the geography of the rabbits’ journey easier for readers to follow. Despite these adjustments, the map retains its original purpose: anchoring Adams’s tale of exile and survival within a detailed and recognisable English landscape.

First Illustrated Edition of Watership Down

Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980) combines a medieval murder mystery with the author’s lifelong interest in signs, knowledge, and interpretation. The plan of the monastery – dominated by the labyrinthine library of the Aedificium – transforms the setting into a cartographic riddle, where the arrangement of books and rooms forms a symbolic geography of learning.

Umberto Eco's debut novel 'Il Nome della Rosa'

The Library of America boxed set of the Hainish Novels features endpaper maps drawn by Le Guin. These depict the planet Gethen and a star chart of Hainish-descent worlds, reflecting the series' core premise of Hain's diaspora and the distinct evolutionary paths of its separated colonies over millions of years.

Le Guin is often regarded primarily as a writer of ideas – her fiction understood as a series of thought experiments refracting and illuminating contemporary political and social concerns, including gender and feminism, environmentalism, and colonialism. Yet her own maps complicate any simple opposition between conceptual focus and world-building. Like J. R. R. Tolkien, she is on record as stating that for her, the map was the starting point.

Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish Novels

George A. Walker’s 2019 edition of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark reimagines the Bellman’s Map as a vehicle for political satire, filling the famous blank with Trump-era allegory. By supplying detail where Carroll offered none, it abandons the philosophical conceit of the original, replacing the void with a lampoon of contemporary politics.

Walker’s 2019 edition of The Hunting of the Snark

Emmy Ingeborg Brun’s hand-painted globes of Mars adapt Percival Lowell’s ‘canal’ maps into celestial manifestos of utopian cooperation. Her red-and-blue network of waterways translates speculative astronomy into a vision of idealised moral order.

Mars after Percival Lowell

Produced by Greaves & Thomas, this celestial globe adapts nineteenth-century astronomical cartography to the imaginative universe of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Tenniel’s characters replace the constellations, transforming the night sky into a playful cartography of Wonderland.

Alice’s Celestial Globe

Ruscelli’s engraved pairing of Ptolemy’s projection and his own North Atlantic chart combines the classical and the speculative frontiers of cartography. The inclusion of the mythical Frisland demonstrates how sixteenth‑century maps could fabricate as well as record the world.

Mythical Islands in the North Atlantic

 charted the supposed wanderings of Odysseus, the first printed map to do so. By mapping mythic voyages alongside the real Mediterranean, Ortelius merged classical scholarship with the aesthetics of Renaissance atlases.

The Errors of Ulysses from Ortelius's Parergon

This elaborate engraved plate by Matthäus Seutter presents an imaginary landscape designed to illustrate the conventions and symbols of cartography. Created as a teaching aid, it gathers rivers, mountains, cities, and other map features into a single invented geography, offering students a visual guide to the craft of map making.

Matthäus Seutter's Map of Natural Geography

This detailed map of Africa by the English cartographer John Cary reflects the period’s confidence in geographical science while drawing heavily on contemporary travel accounts and earlier authorities. It notably includes two celebrated phantom ranges – the Mountains of Kong in West Africa and the Mountains of the Moon in the east – demonstrating how conjecture and inherited legend could become embedded within apparently authoritative cartography.

John Cary's Map of Africa

This 1877 map traces the clandestine surveying journey of the Indian explorer Nain Singh Rawat across Tibet, undertaken for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. The exploits of such ‘pundit’ surveyors helped inspire the espionage-tinged geography of Rudyard Kipling’s 

A Pundit Map 

Orlando Ferguson’s bizarre lithographed Map of the Square and Stationary Earth depicts a roulette-like flat world bounded by angels, scripture, and geometry. Intended to refute the ‘flying globe’ theory, it uses cartographic tradition as a vehicle for biblical polemic and eccentric cosmology.

Map of the Square and Stationary Earth

Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Map of Faerie-Land presents a panoramic chart uniting the mythic realms of folklore and literature.

An Anciente Map of Faerie-Land

Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Map of Faerie-Land presents a panoramic chart uniting the mythic realms of folklore and literature. Emerging from the aesthetic tradition of Victorian neo-medievalism, to gather the realms of myth and story into a single imagined geography.

Panoramic Map of Faerie-Land

This pictorial map gathers nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale locales into a single panorama. Crowded with familiar characters and scenes, it creates a playful geography of childhood for early twentieth-century readers.

The Land of Make Believe

Austrian-born artist Mariette Lydis uses the visual language of cartography to chart a mysterious inner landscape, replete with occult and psychological meaning, rather than a geographical one.

Mariette Lydis's L'Oracle

This German ‘Map of Bookland’ charts a bibliophilic kingdom populated by authors, genres, and readers, literalising the conceit of reading being an excursion for the mind.

The Map of Bookland

Pauline Baynes’s ‘A Map of Middle-Earth’ distils the epic landscape into a single decorative chart, surrounded by vignettes of its peoples and creatures in her vivid illustration style.

Map of Middle-Earth

Baynes’s large-format map expands her earlier work into a single panoramic landscape. It gathers the settings of all seven chronicles into one image, transforming episodic adventures into a single imaginative landscape.

Map of Narnia

This first printing of Dungeons & Dragons, designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, introduced a revolutionary form of collaborative fantasy storytelling built around maps of dungeons and imagined landscapes. In play, the Dungeon Master acts as the world’s cartographer, preparing hidden maps of dungeons and wildernesses that players gradually discover through exploration and description.

Dungeons & Dragons Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns

, designed by Brian Blume and Gary Gygax, was TSR’s early attempt to extend role-playing games beyond medieval fantasy into the gunfights and frontier towns of the American West. Its simple floor plans and town sketches reflect the do-it-yourself ethos of the early RPG hobby, where rough maps served less as finished artefacts than as prompts for players staging their own dramatic showdowns.

Blume and Gygax's Boot Hill

The iconic 1980 hex-grid map of the World of Greyhawk – drawn by artist Darlene Pekul – was one of the first official cartographies for a Dungeons & Dragonsadventure setting. It captures the martial, morally ambiguous tone of Gary Gygax’s seminal campaign world, where heraldic kingdoms and lawless frontiers meet in a grim sword-and-sorcery landscape.

The World of Greyhawk

This classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure by Tracy and Laura Hickman introduced the Gothic horror realm of Barovia and its tragic ruler, the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich. Accompanied by evocative maps – including detailed isometric cutaways of Castle Ravenloft – the module demonstrated how cartography could deepen narrative immersion in role-playing games, helping transform D&D from a series of dungeon encounters into a more fully imagined narrative world.

Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft

This influential TSR boxed set introduced Ed Greenwood’s 

 players, presenting the sprawling continent of Faerûn as a richly detailed setting for adventure. Accompanied by numerous maps – including large full-colour poster maps and detailed city plans – the set helped establish the Realms as one of the most fully realised fantasy worlds in role-playing games.

Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms Campaign Set

Bernard Sleigh’s Chintz Fabric Map of Fairy Land adapts the imagery of his celebrated Map of Fairyland for decorative textile design. Its pastel kingdoms and looping borders turn fairy-tale geography into a decorative pattern for the nursery and home.

Chintz Fabric Map of Fairy Land

A pioneering 1970s text adventure, Zork I immersed players in the Great Underground Empire through typed commands and exploration. The accompanying surface map offers an evocative glimpse of the wider world beyond the game’s gloomy tunnels and caverns. Zork’s cult status endures, and its early maps reveal the roots of both digital fantasy gaming and interactive fiction.

Map of the World of Zork

Nintendo’s original The Legend of Zelda combined puzzle-solving with open-world exploration, helping define the digital action-adventure genre. Released in Japan on the Famicom Disk System, its evocative overworld map and distinctive gold cartridge helped launch a still much-loved franchise.

The Legend of Zelda

Released in 1993, Myst revolutionised gaming with its contemplative approach to exploration and puzzle-solving. The map of Myst Island anchors this experience, situating key landmarks and opening gateways to the game’s mysterious Ages.

Map of Myst Island

The original Pokémon games for the Nintendo Game Boy introduced players to the region of Kanto, a stylised landscape of towns, caves, forests, and coastal routes. The fold-out ‘Pocket Monsters Town Map’ presents this world as a continuous geography loosely based on the Kantō region of designer Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood.

Pokémon Red and Green Versions

Francesco Berlinghieri’s Italian version of Claudius Ptolemy’s 'Geographia' is one of the earliest European printed atlases produced in a vernacular language, and using 'terza rima' verse. The maps within the atlas were created with considerable skill by a master engraver thought to be Francesco Rosselli (1448–c.1513) and include contemporary maps of Spain, France, Italy, and the Holy Land. This is the first time these 'modern maps' appear as copper-engravings, updating the woodcut maps that feature in Lienhart Holl's Ulm Edition of 'Cosmographia' released in the same year. Smudges, excess ink, and even the printer’s thumbprints appear as charming fifteenth century 'makers marks' that point to the fact that copperplate printing was still a new technology

Berlinghieri's 'Geographia'

Exquisitely engraved, this 1507 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's 'Geographia' was created by Johannes Ruysch, a friend of Raphael and court painter to Pope Julius II. This atlas featured twenty-seven Ptolemaic maps and seven additional ‘modern’ maps edited by the Celestine monk Marcus Beneventanus. One of these 'modern' maps includes the fan-shaped world map, which is very rare and celebrated as one of the earliest printed European maps to include the Americas. At the North Pole, Ruysch depicts four islands surrounding a mountainous island of iron that were believed to exist and have magnetic properties - an idea later copied and disseminated by Gerard Mercator.

Ruysch's 'Geographia'

Johannes Werner’s 1514 translation of Claudius Ptolemy’s 'Geographia' is a major landmark in the history of mathematical geography and scientific cartography. It was highly influential to map makers and astronomers, including Petrus Apianus, for over two centuries after its publication.

Werner's work is significant because it was the first direct translation of the 'Geographia' from the original Greek, rather than from a Latin or Arabic translation. It is also important because it features Werner’s additions to Ptolemy’s text. Among these additions are four new maps, including one of his own design: a equal-area projection in a cordiform, or heart-shape, projection. Werner also included an important description and illustration of a meteoroscope - a device developed by Ptolemy and revived by Regiomontanus which is used to help calculate the position of stars.

Werner’s 'Geographia'

Sebastian Münster’s edition of Claudius Ptolemy's 'Geographia' established the convention that a universal atlas should include world and continental maps and was the first printed work to render latitude and longitude in their now-standard form. It also includes the first printed map of the Western Hemisphere, the first set of maps of the four continents, and the first printed map to name the Pacific Ocean.

Although it is not known who was responsible for the woodcut maps themselves, the decorative borders have been attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Indeed, Münster’s maps are particularly famous for their embellishments - there are forty-eight of them in total: twenty-seven ancient Ptolemaic maps, and twenty-one ‘modern’ maps. This very rare first edition also features rich contemporary hand colouring throughout.

Münster's 'Geographia' 


This atlas is especially notable as the Michael Villanovanus, or Michael Servetus, edition. It is his second edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’ in which some of the texts were redacted following accusations of heresy by church officials. Servetus would ultimately be executed twelve years after its publication.

The maps of this edition are printed from the same woodblocks that were created by Laurent Fries for the 1522 edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’. These in turn were reductions of the famous maps of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1513 edition. Spanning decades of revision and reproduction, the atlas is an amalgam of traditional and new cartography.

This work is also notable for a full-page woodcut armillary sphere contributed by Albrecht Dürer placed at the conclusion of the atlas.

Servetus Edition of Fries’ 'Geographia'

The 'Cosmographia' is the most famous work of Sebastian Münster, a hugely influential cosmographer and mapmaker. Münster was also well-known for his radical new edition of Claudius Ptolemy's 'Geographia', which contained twenty-one exciting new 'modern' maps.

This edition of the 'Cosmographia' is in remarkably fine condition. It contains both of Münster's famous world maps, along with continental maps of America, Asia, and Africa, nine maps of Europe, three folding panoramas, thirty-eight double-page city views, eight full-page city views and over 1,000 woodcut illustrations and diagrams. This edition also features Münster's legendary drawing of sea and land monsters.

The imagery was created by an illustrious roster of artists who included Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch and David Kandel.

Explore the collection of Oculi Mundi