History
Somewhere around 1604 Willem Blaeu settled down in Amsterdam and opened a shop on the Damrak, where he produced and sold scientific instruments, globes and maps. He was also a publisher, editor and engraver.
In 1629, Willem Blaeu bought the copperplates of several dozens of maps from Jodocus Hondius II's widow. Afterwards, he published an Atlantis Appendix to Mercator's atlas in 1630, containing 60 maps, but no text. The next year a new edition was published, with 98 maps and descriptive text in Latin.
Willem and his son Joan Blaeu made a public announcement in an Amsterdam newspaper that they would publish their own full atlas in 1634. Their first atlas was completed in 1635 and appeared in four different versions: Novus Atlas (German edition, 208 maps in two volumes), Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, sive, Atlas Novus (Latin edition, 207 maps in two volumes; title refers to Ortelius' Theatrum Orbis Terrarum), Toonneel des Aerdrycks (Dutch edition, also 207 maps in two volumes) and finally Theatre du Monde ou Nouvel Atlas (French edition, 208 maps in two volumes (like the German edition)).
After his father's death in 1638, Joan continued to rework and expand the atlas. A three volume edition was published from 1640 onwards. Joan later published the Atlas of England with maps of John Speed, the Atlas of Scotland (1654) with maps of Timothy Pont and Robert Gordon, and Martino Martini's Novus Atlas Sinensis (Atlas of China, 1655), which were added as respectively the fourth, fifth and sixth volumes of Blaeu's Atlas Novus.
The final version of the atlas was published as the Atlas Maior and contained 594 maps in eleven (Latin edition), twelve (French edition), nine (Dutch edition) or ten (German and Spanish editions) volumes. The first volumes were published in 1662, the last volume was finished in 1665, although Joan continued to rework several volumes, the Spanish edition in particular. This version of the Atlas Maior was the largest and most expansive book published in the seventeenth century.
However, this was only intended to be the first part of a much larger work, which is illustrated by the full title of the atlas: Atlas Maior, sive Cosmographia Blaviana, qua solum, salum, coelum, accuratissime describuntur (Major Atlas or Blaeu's Cosmography, in which are most accurately described earth, sea, and heaven). The second part (about the coasts, seas and oceans) and third part (with maps of the skies) were never finished.
In 1672, fire broke out in the workshop. Joan Blaeu died the next year. No new editions of his atlases were published and the family business went bankrupt within a few years.
Read more about this topic: Atlas Maior
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)