Maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering… Charles C. Mann

The fourth part of the world : the race to the ends of the Earth, and the epic story of the map that gave America its name  Toby Lester  New York : Free Press, 2009  Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. xii, 462 p. : ill, maps ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. 407-435) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG

The 1507 Universalis cosmographiae by Martin Waldseemüller is the first map to show the continents of the New World separated from Asia, revealing the Pacific Ocean. Often called the “Birth Certificate of America,” it is also the first map on which the name “America” appears. The only surviving copy, displayed here, is a masterpiece of woodblock printing and is modeled after the earlier world maps of second century geographer Claudius Ptolemy.

The Waldseemüller Map of 1507 introduced an astonishing collection of cartological firsts. It was the first map to show the New World as a separate continent, alongside Europe, Africa and Asia – and the first on which the word ‘America’ appears. It was the first map to suggest the existence of the Pacific. It was, in short, the first map to depict the whole world as we know it today.Beautiful, fascinating and revealing, it arrived on the scene as Europeans were moving out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, thanks to a tiny group of European mapmakers who pieced together ideas going back to the ancients and through Marco Polo to Vespucci. In The Fourth Part of the World, Toby Lester charts the amazing and colourful history of this map, whose profound influence has been neglected for centuries and which changed the world-view of all humankind.

Printed on twelve sheets, the Carta Marina, like the Martin Waldsemüller’s 1507 world map, was part of the volume of cartographic materials, known as the Sammelband, assembled by mathematician, alchemist, and globe-maker Johann Schörner. Sheet number six appears slightly different in color from the other eleven sheets of the map because it is printed on a different type of paper and most probably was a proof sheet. This sheet of the map was not originally bound into the Sammelband like the others and seems to have been added at a later date.

The Schöner Sammelband is arguably one of the most important compilations of cartographic materials to survive from the early Renaissance. The Sammelband, or compilation, was discovered in 1901 by the Jesuit historian, Father Josef Fischer, in the library of the Castle of Wolfegg, in Württemberg, Germany. The volume had been assembled sometime after 1516 and contained the only surviving copies of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 Universalis cosmographiae, his 1516 Carta Marina Navigatoria (page shown)and globe patterns by the mathematician, alchemist and globe-maker Johann Schöner (1477–1547).

This is a portion of a sixteenth-century portolan (or sailing) chart of the Pacific Coast of Central and South America, showing the region from Guatemala to northern Peru. The names of coastal towns on the map are written in two different hands, dating the chart to the middle of the sixteenth century.