Enfilade

Press release from The London Map Fair:

2011 London Antique Map Fair
Royal Geographic Society, London, 11-12 June 2011

Johann Baptist Homann. "Sphærarum Artificialium Typica..." Nuremberg, ca.1730.

The 2011 London Map Fair, taking place in the historic surroundings of the Royal Geographical Society, is the most established and largest antiquarian map fair in Europe: over forty of the leading national and international specialist map dealers will be exhibiting in June. Visitors to the fair will discover a vast selection of original antique maps covering the whole world and printed between the 15th and 19th centuries. Highlights include a map of the universe by seventeenth-century Venetian cartographer Coronelli, revealing the Nine Circles of Hell as described in Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as a 19th-century curiosity map of Europe depicting each country in the form of a caricature: the United Kingdom
figures as an old crone.

Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr, "Globi Coelestis," 1 of 6 Celestial Charts, Nuremberg, Homann, 1742

Other fine maps offered this year will include: an example of Ogilby’s innovative and incredibly detailed, 17th-century road map, marking all inns, churches and other landmarks on the road from London to Portsmouth – the course of the modern A3; an impression of Braun and Hogenberg’s bird’s-eye view of London; the earliest surviving printed plan of the city, dated 1574; and Christoph Vetter’s rare and beautiful 17th-century depiction of Bohemia stylised as a rose, with Prague at its centre and Vienna, the seat of the Hapsburg Dynasty, at its root. Exhibitors will offer atlases, travel books, globes, sea charts, town plans, celestial maps, topographical prints and
reference books; there are prices to suit all pockets ranging
from a very affordable £10 to over £100,000 for exceptional
pieces.

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2011 London Map Fair Lecture: Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams
Royal Geographic Society, London, 11 June 2011

On Saturday, 11 June 2011, at 2:30pm, Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams will launch their long-awaited Dictionary of British Map Engravers at the Fair. The product of over twenty years of research, it offers a wealth of fresh material on the map trade and a new insight into the lives of its most important figures, revealing some surprising links and relationships in the process.

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From the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers:

Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams, British Map Engravers: A Dictionary of Engravers, Lithographers and Their Principal Employers to 1850 (London: Rare Book Society, 2011), approximately 750 pages, £125.

The ultimate guide to the identification of British antique maps and their makers: An illustrated dictionary of over 1,500 members of the map trade in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, of British-born engravers working overseas and foreign engravers working in the British Isles, from the beginnings until the mid 19th century. Included are all the known engravers and lithographers, globemakers and retailers, the principal map sellers and publishers, key cartographers, makers of map-based games and puzzles, but also the remarkable lives of many artists, dealers and publishers, whose fates have been unknown so far. (more…)