Muenster, Sebastian (1489-1552).

Cosmographia. Beschreibung Aller Lander

      Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1548. Folio (12 4/8 x 8 inches). Title-page printed in red and black, 28 double-page woodcut maps with descriptive text on recto within historiated woodcut borders, illustrated throughout with fine woodcuts depicting peoples, places, historic events, customs, exotic animals etc, one or two full-page (some spotting and staining, particularly to the later leaves). Contemporary paneled pigskin over bevelled boards, each cover decorated with alternating blind fillets of heads in medallion rolls: one depicting Greek heroes "Hector" etc, and the other the virtues "Charitas", "Justicia" and "Fides" etc., surrounding finer fillets of flower and urn tools, filled in with blind stamped tudor rose and acorn tools; the spine in five compartments with four raised bands decorated with large acorn tools, brass catches and clasps (extremities a bit scuffed, stained). Provenance: Early 20th-century bookplate of Boekenrik Vangassen on the front paste-down; bookplate of Liechtensteinhaus. Third German edition, first published in Basel in 1544. Including separate sections on Africa, Asia and "Vond den neuwen inseln: wann und von wem die erfunden/wie sie heissen und was fue leut darin seind" a description of America including accounts of the voyages and explorations of Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan, &c. The map of America is in Burden's state 4 with Novus Orbis removed, "Die Nuw Welt" widesly spaced, and the correct "Atlantica" rather than "Atlaitica" in South America. Sebastian Munster was to become one of "the most influential cartographers in the sixteenth century" (Burden). Essentially he published Ptolemy's "Geography" with a "further section of modern, more up to date maps. He included for the first time a set of continental maps, the America was the earliest of any notes? He was one of the first to create space in the woodblock for insertion of place-names in metal type. The maps' inclusion in Munster's "Cosmography"? sealed the fate of "America" as the name for the new world. The book