An exceptional set of two sheets of copperplate printed globe gores and stand papers for a 10.5cm diameter terrestrial globe by Heinrich Scherer, dated 1700. Both sheets are in excellent condition with no tears or damage and thankfully and rarely remain untinted.
There is a cartouche on the first gore stating “Globus Geographicus Novus Anno 1700”. The second sheet is rarely seen and has the necessary ephemera to construct the stand, including the horizon, hour ring, meridian, quadrans, and moveable cursor.

The twelve globe gores depict the world centered on the Atlantic Ocean. North America is stretched east-to-west in the north, a typical depiction for the time. A Northwest Passage is suggested, as open water flows around the Arctic waters into the Pacific. There is also an open river flowing into the interior of the continent, suggesting an interior passage as well. California is separated from the continent as an island, again a common depiction for the time.

Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of South America, is shown in a curious way. The lands of Patagonia are exaggerated in the southwestern portion of the continent. The Straits of Magellan, first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan in 1520, are shown. Tierra del Fuego is not labeled as due south of the Straits, but as to the east of it, where Staten Land usually is shown on other maps.
In Asia, the north of Japan is large and bulbous, labeled as “T. Iedso.” Iedso is a reference to Jesso, a feature included on many seventeenth and eighteenth-century maps. Historically, Eso (Yeco, Jesso, Yedso, Yesso) refers to the island of Hokkaido. It varies on maps from a small island to a near-continent-sized mass that stretched from Asia to Alaska.
Farther south, New Holland, or Australia, is outlined. The Dutch had been encountering Western Australia for a century by the time this map was made, but Western Australia remained a mystery to Europeans until the late eighteenth century; here eastern Australia is left open and blank to show this ambiguity. Farther east, the western edge of New Zealand is shown. This was contacted by Abel Tasman in the 1640s, but would not be seen again by Europeans until Captain Cook’s first voyage, which set out in 1768.

Heinrich Scherer (1628-1704) was a Professor of Hebrew, Mathematics and Ethics at the University of Dillingen until about 1680. Thereafter he obtained important positions as Official Tutor to the Royal Princes of Mantua and Bavaria. It was during his time in Munich as Tutor to the Princely house of Bavaria that his lifetime's work as a cartographer received acclaim and recognition.
Scherer's 'Atlas Novus', first published in Munich between 1702 and 1710 and reissued in a second edition between 1730 and 1737 was a revolutionary work in terms of the development of European mapmaking at the beginning of the 18th Century.
The Atlas comprised 7 separate volumes entitled 'Geographia Naturalis', 'Geographia Hierarchica', 'Geographia Politica', 'Tabellae Geographicae', 'Atlas Marianus', 'Critica Quadrapartita', and 'Geographia Artificialis'. The 180 maps included in this work were prepared between 1699 and 1700 and were engraved by Leonard Hecknaeur, Joseph Montelegre or Matthus Wolfgang with each volume introduced by fine allegorical frontispieces by the same engravers.

What makes Scherer's maps unusual is their highly decorative Catholic iconography and imagery and the revolutionary thematic nature of many of the maps. Scherer himself was a Jesuit and many of the maps draw heavily from the history and development of the Jesuit order since its establishment by St.Ignatius Loyala in the early 16th century when it was the driving force behind the European Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Scherer's maps vividly chart the revival and spread of the Catholic faith in the late 16th and 17th centuries principally through the efforts of Jesuit missionaries around the globe and most notably in North and South America, southeast Asia and the Far East.
Scherer fills his maps with the images of vibrant religiosity, of a vital Catholic Faith of contemporary Jesuit Saints and merciful Madonnas, a World divided between Darkness and Light, between the Protestant-Heathen & the True Believer, between the Chosen Sheep and the Rejected Goats.
This is not surprising given Scherer's Jesuit roots and the publication of his work in the deeply conservative Catholic Bavarian stronghold of Munich. In this imagery, Scherer took some of the first steps towards the development of what may be called thematic cartography.
On many of his maps he divides the world between areas of shaded darkness and unshaded light, the latter representing the light of the Catholic faith around the globe, albeit sometimes being shown in terms of hope rather than reality. This is certainly true for example in China, an area which Scherer invariably shows as unshaded in spite of the stumbling progress and limited successes of the small Jesuit Mission established in China by Matteo Ricci in the late 16th century.
Scherer takes thematic cartography one step further in the 'Geographia Politica' and 'Geographia Naturalis'. He produces maps that remove political boundaries, borders, and place names, replacing them with the revolutionary concept for the period of showing the Mountains and forests in physical relief with all of the major waterways and rivers systems clearly depicted.

Scherer's atlas forms an important milestone in the development of scientific and thematic cartography, providing a remarkable and revolutionary alternative vision of the World in showing only its major physical and topographical features.

Reference: Shirley. The mapping of the world, p. 619, 625 [633]