1540 MÃœNSTER, S. - Geographia universalis, vetus et nova, complectens. . .

The rare FIRST EDITION of Sebastian Münster's Geographia Universalis, published in 1540. This was a new and important edition of Ptolemy, with redesigned maps and the text revised by Münster based on the Willibald Pirckheimer Latin translation with corrections of 1535 by Servetus.
The Geographia was landmark work which contained, along with the Ptolemaic maps, several of the most significant modern maps in the history of cartography.

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The first separate maps of the four continents appear here, and include the earliest maps of the 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.
Sebastian Münster (1448-1552) was a mathematician, geographer and professor at Basel University. He also compiled a highly influential encyclopaedic 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.

With 27 maps of the ancient world and 21 of the modern world, together 48 double-page woodcut maps, each within a woodcut border, 7 woodcut diagrams in the text and one full-page woodcut, printer's woodcut device on verso of colophon leaf, errata leaf and blank leaf C6, woodcut initials throughout. Modern, blind stamped calf binding. Very good condition, sound paper.

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Reference: Burden, The Mapping of North America, #12, 1st state. Shirley, The Mapping of the World, #77, 1st state. Alden, Vol. I, p. 52, #542/22. Stevens (Ptolemy) 49: Karrow. Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, p. 422.

Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 - 26 May 1552)

He is known for:

• His early maps of Germany. From the late 1520s, he surveyed and mapped the German lands, relying on friends and local scholars for data.
• Ptolemy's Geographia (Basel, 1540). An edition that combined the classical Ptolemaic maps with new maps of the modern world, showing the continents as they were then understood.
• The Cosmographia (first edition 1544). 

He is best known for his Cosmographia
First published in German in Basel by Heinrich Petri in 1544, the Cosmographia described every known region of the world: its geography, peoples, customs, history, natural wonders, and cities. Münster gathered material from classical and contemporary authors and also asked scholars, officials and travelers across Europe to contribute descriptions and views of their own regions, an early example of crowd-sourced scholarship. The work was extraordinarily successful. The book appeared in more than forty editions between 1544 and 1650, in German, Latin, French, Italian, Czech and an abridged English version. His successors later enlarged editions, so the book's content changed considerably over the century.