Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

Engraved map with hand-coloring, 317 x 387 mm. (Light soiling, marginal penciled notations, lower margin trimmed close, few spots of minor restoration.) Decorative cartouche. German text and decorative fleuron on verso.

Münster was a German cartographer and cosmographer whose 1544 Cosmographia is considered the earliest printed description of the world in the German language. The work was immensely popular, going through 24 editions over the following century. As geographic knowledge—particularly of the Americas—expanded, the original woodblocks were periodically updated. However, the present copy still shows the pronounced bulge along the Chilean coastline, a feature already corrected in contemporary editions of Ortelius’s copperplate map on which it was based. Burden 67; Goss 11; Van den Broecke 10.