Original color example map of Connecticut and Rhode Island, from an early edition of Bradford's Comprehensive Atlas.
The map is colored by counties and shows towns, rivers, lakes, bays, harbors, islands and other important places. Block Island and Long Island appear prominently. Bradford's Comprehensive Atlas launched him as one of the prominent cartographic publishers of the period. This and his larger atlases, published first in 1838, were one of the most popular of the period.
Thomas Gamaliel Bradford (1802-1887) was an American geographic publisher. He hailed from Bradford, Massachusetts and began his publishing career by working for the America Encyclopedia. Then, he edited and republished the Atlas Designed to Illustrate the Abridgement of Universal Geography, Modern & Ancient, which had originally been offered in French by Adrian Balbi. In 1835, he published another atlas, A Comprehensive Atlas: Geographical, Historical & Commercial, and, in 1838, An Illustrated Atlas Geographical, Statistical and Historical of the United States and Adjacent Countries. His interests were primarily in educational publishing and he was one of the first mapmakers to show Texas as an independent country.