Tabula Asiae I

Woodcut uncolored 1st. map of Asia. Covers Asia Minor, parts of the Black Sea and Cyprus. Shows cities, towns, rivers and mountains. Relief shown pictorially. Includes legend and list town names. Text and map bound out of order. // First edition of Sebastian Munster’s Geographia Universalis, published in 1540. A new and important edition of Ptolemy, with redesigned maps and the text revised by Sebastian Munster, based on the Willibald Pirckheimer Latin translation, with corrections of 1535 by Servetus. A reprint was made in 1542 and two re-editions, adding maps, in 1545 and 1552. The atlas consists of Letterpress title, Liber I-VIII, plus text printed in two columns, including 7 woodcut diagrams in the text, tables, errata, index and one full-page printer’s woodcut device on verso of colophon leaf. Also includes 48 double-page woodcut maps, 27 maps of the ancient world, 21 of the modern world, each within a woodcut border, and with descriptive text on reverse of each map, printed within ornamental woodcut borders, designed in the Holbein style. Includes the first separate maps of the four continents, and the earliest maps of Western Hemisphere and Africa, also the first separately printed map of England, and the oldest obtainable woodcut of Scandinavia. The map Novarum insularum is one of the earliest available separate maps depicting the Americas in a recognizable form. Maps are uncolored, showing settlements, landmarks, roads, rivers and mountains. Bound in reddish brown full calf embossed binding, with title Ptolemaei Geographia Universalis stamped on spine. Sebastian Munster,1448-1552, was a mathematician, geographer and professor at Basel University. He also compiled a highly influential encyclopedic work entitled Cosmographia Universalis, which first appeared in 1544 and contained forty-eight woodcut maps. He was among the first editors of a published geographical text to quote or acknowledge his sources and authorities.