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Stock# 68884
Description

A beautiful miniature Halma edition of a Sanson gentleman's pocket atlas in exquisite full contemporary Dutch color.

The volume includes Sanson's pocket atlas, with Bion's useful work on globes. Although this atlas is always listed under Nicolas Sanson, it is essentially Francois Halma's plagiarized pocket version of the Sanson atlas, with the map divided into continent groups. Halma (1653-1722) also reprinted Mercator's Ptolemy and Bonfrere's Geography for the growing French market.

The engraved allegorical title-page has caused some confusion among catalogers in the past, as it includes the date "1760". In all likelihood, this is an inversion of 1706 or some similar error, as Halma was dead by 1722. Neither the coloring nor anything else about the book suggests that it was published after 1720.

Provenance

  • Baltazar Ciecierski (born 1680), court official of Drohiczyn, in Poland (inscribed on first dedication leaf “Ex biblioteca M. Balthasaris Ciecierskei [...]”);
  • Jean R. Perrette, famed atlas and travel book collector.  His sale, Christie's New York, 2016
Condition Description
Small quarto. Contemporary calf (rebacked, old spine laid down). 6 parts in one volume, including Bion's L'Usage des globes and Luyts' Tables. Double-page letterpress title printed in red and black with engraved vignette, hand-colored initials and headpieces, double-page engraved frontispiece (dated 1760) and 72 (of 74) maps (lacking “Amerique Septentrionale” and “Isles Bermudes”), the Bion with one double-page celestial map and 14 diagrams (10 folding), all in beautiful original hand-color. (Some light browning.)
Reference
See Koeman Hal 1; Phillips, Atlases, 528.
Guillaume Sanson Biography

The son of famous French cartographer Nicolas Sanson, Guillaume (1633-1703) carried on his father's work. Like his sire, he was a court geographer to Louis XIV. He often worked in partnership with another prominent cartographer of the time, Hubert Jaillot.