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THE FIRST MODERN ATLAS -- "THE MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL PTOLEMY EDITIONS" -- THE BOURNE-ROSENBACH-STREETER-WARDINGTON COPY. First edition. Strasbourg: Johann Schott, 1513. Folio ( 17 1/2" x 12 1/2", 444mm x 317mm). With 47 woodcut maps by Martin Waldseemüller, 45 double-page, 2 single (the final map printed in three colors). Bound in contemporary paneled dark calf (rebacked) over wooden boards with red silk ties. On the boards, two broad borders of emblems blind. In the central panel, fleurons with two sets of initials: "T. C." and "T. A." On the spine, seven raised bands with blind fleurons in the panels. Presented in a felt-lined clam-shell box by Brockman. Rebacked. Conserved by James and Stuart Brockman (full report available on request). Ties perished. Lacking the final blank. Small dampstain to the lower fore-corner, with some additions and repairs. Ownership signature on the title-page: "Su[m] Jo(hannis) Bourne". With scattered early ink marginalia to the text and to the plates. Bookplate of Thomas Winthrop Streeter (his sale, Parke-Bernet 25 October 1966, lot 6) to the front-paste down, between a lot description of the volume and the armorial bookplate of York Minster. Gilt bookplate of Lord Wardington (his sale, Sotheby's London 10 October 2006, lot 399) to the rear paste-down. Claudius Ptolemaeus was a second-century philosopher living in Roman Alexandria in Egypt. In the Greek tradition, philosophy -- the love of wisdom -- bridged what we now divide into the humanities and the sciences; he was a mathematician, natural scientist and geographer-astronomer. No manuscripts of the Geographike Hyphegesis (Geographical Guidance) survive from before the XIIIc, but some examples survive with maps that bear some relation to those Ptolemy himself drew. Various translations circulated, but Ringmann's is generally regarded as superior to his predecessors'. In the XVc, the Geographia was the core of ancient knowledge of the world. It was crucial to explorers; Columbus expected to find the East Indies because of Ptolemy's calculations and assertions about longitude. With funding from René II, Duke of Lorraine (whence the polychromy of the map of Lorraine), Walter Lud, canon in St-Dié-des-Vosges, gathered a group of humanists to knit together the new knowledge coming from Christopher Columbus and other early explorers with a new translation (Ringmann) and new maps (Waldseemüller). Together they revolutionized cartography, and were likely responsible with the coinage of America and a description of the New World. The provenance of the present copy befits the importance of the work. Sir John Bourne (ca. 1518-1575) was, until the accession of Queen Mary (1553), a rather minor parliamentary figure. Probably due to his support of Mary's claim in the succession crisis, he was knighted, given a manor and elevated to a principal secretaryship on the Privy Council. Having grown quite rich -- he was a founder of the Russia (or Muscovy) Company, perhaps the source of his geographic curiosity -- Bourne was a significant book-collector, and more than a dozen of his volumes (in Greek, Latin and Hebrew) are to be found in institutional libraries. Eight of Bourne's books remain in the collection of York Minster, most having been acquired by Toby Matthew, Archbishop of York. Doubtless our volume entered the library of the cathedral in the same way. Long afterwards, the book was bought privately by that greatest of all booksellers, A.S.W. Rosenbach, who sold it to Thomas W. Streeter, whose sale of Americana was epochal. Charles W. Traylen -- himself a force among booksellers for some eight decades -- bought the volume at that sale on behalf of Christopher Henry Beaumont Pease, Lord Wardington, in whose collection it remained until his death. His landmark sale of important atlases and geographies in 2006 included some 20 copies of Ptolemy's Geography. Fairfax Murray German 348 and 348A; Harrisse 74; Phillips 359; Sabin 66478; Shirley 34; Streeter I:6.
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