MERCATOR (Gerhard Kremer dit Gerardus) [and Joost de Hondt d - Lot 221

MERCATOR (Gerhard Kremer dit Gerardus) [and Joost de Hondt dit Jodocus HONDIUS]. Atlas minor. Amsterodami, ex officina Ioannis Ianssonii, 1634. In-4 oblong, 651 [numbered without missing 1to168 and 177to360, and with others a few inconsequential errors]-(5of which the last 2 are blank)pp., 2-column printing, semi-rigid parchment, smooth spine with old ink titles ("Atlante minore" and "Geographia"); binding a little rubbed, some leaves a little frayed or with angular lack, some leaves with restorations, worm work on the first 3 leaves including the title (the latter with restoration affecting the text), title with fold and with left margin glued to the endpaper, sometimes wide wetness affecting then text and prints, paper often heavily scorched, restored tears on ff.E1-2, a few stains (contemporary binding). Extensive copper-engraved illustrations: one off-text title, one off-text plate (map of Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan and LeMaire after Barent Jansz Potgieter), 142 full-page illustrations in the text, totalling 165 maps (30 of these maps are spread over 7covers). Peter Vander Krogt, 352:02. A monument to the early golden age of Dutch cartography. Cartographer and mathematician Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) is considered "the greatest name in geographical science after Ptolemy" (Tooley). The inventor of a new method of cartographic projection, he was also the first to use the term atlas for a collection of maps. His major work was his atlas, the first maps of which he had printed in the 1560s, and which was published in three parts, in 1585, 1590 and 1595 (the latter shortly after his death), reunited in a first collective folio edition in the same year, 1595, comprising some one hundred maps. Monumental though it was, this atlas remained unfinished, covering only Europe and not Spain. Mercator's son and grandsons added several editions, but it was the cartographer, engraver and publisher Joost de Hoondt, known as Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), who completed the work: in 1604, he bought Mercator's collection and published a new edition in 1606, which he enlarged with texts by the humanist Pieter Van Der Berghe, known as Petrus Montanus - several further enlarged editions were subsequently published by different publishers under different titles and in different languages. In 1607, Hondius published a more manageable version of this work, in reduced form, under the title Atlas minor, and Jan Janszoon dit Joannes Janssonius gave an updated version in 1620, with text in Dutch: it is this version, with text in Latin, which is removed here.