The Last of the Great Nuremberg Globemakers
A fascinating uncut engraving of parts made for a globe, including four polar calottes and a horizon ring. The contents of the sheet would actually be parts of two different globes (each 5 1/2 inches in diameter), which were likely to be produced as a pair, one showing the constellations and the other showing the known world.
The geographical northern polar calotte shows Greenland extending the North Pole, while the land west of Baffin's Bay is unengraved; the southern polar calotte shows only water. Constellations visible in the other two circles include Cepheus, Hydrus, Avis Paradisi, Cameleon, and Musca.
The horizon line, which would have been pasted onto an octagonal piece of wood surrounding the globe, shows the signs of the Zodiac, the months, a strange letter-based base-seven dating system, and the cardinal, ordinal, and secondary intercardinal directions.
Johan Klinger was the most important globe-maker at the end of the 19th century. His early works were improvements of Johann Philipp Andreae's earlier globes, but by 1792 he was producing globes showing new discoveries by Cook and Messier. Klinger's globes were produced in a variety of languages and sizes.