The author is Associate Professor in Phonetics at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and editor of the Journal of Phonetics. He became interested in the history of cartography after attending lectures by Professor Gunter Schilder of the Geography Department at the same university and has had extensive discussions with Professor Koeman, another world-renowned expert. Marcel van den Broecke is also a map collector and small scale dealer in Ortelius material.

COLLECTORS OF OLD maps as well as researchers into the history of cartography are regularly faced with the question: how rare is this map? There is no literature to turn to which answers this satisfactorily since reliable data is sadly lacking.

Rarity is determined by two factors — the number of maps produced by the printer and the percentage of that number which have withstood the ravages of time. The number of copies printed is primarily determined by economic considerations. The printer will not produce more copies than can be sold within a reasonable period, otherwise investments — and paper was not a cheap commodity in the sixteenth century — are wasted. Survival is determined by a number of factors. The first is age. The older the map, the smaller its chances of survival. Secondly, the size. A wall map is particularly vulnerable due to its large size and will therefore deteriorate rapidly as can be seen in any geography classroom. The third is protection. A map bound in an atlas is stored as a book and thus protected by its binding. This increased the chance of survival. The fourth is appeal. In all periods of cartography some maps have a stronger appeal than others because of the information they give and their aesthetic value. Fifthly, there is accuracy. Maps which display outdated information tend to be discarded as soon as better information becomes available. This applies particularly to the separate maps of today such as town plans or motorway maps. Lastly, there is breaking. The cutting up of atlases to sell the maps separately has caused considerable loss, not immediately of the loose maps but of the bound volume.

It is not feasible to quantify these factors determining survival but it is possible to make an inventory of atlas maps that have survived and to compare such an inventory with production data. I have attempted to do this, considering maps which are neither so common as to make an inventory of the survivors impossibly large, nor so rare that the resulting inventory becomes a collection of accidental findings.

Choice of material
The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortels or Ortelius (1527-98), an atlas which appeared in about forty editions between 1570 and 1612, meets the above requirements perfectly. It was the first modern world atlas in the sense of a collection of uniformly-sized maps covering the contemporary world, each backed with text, put together to form a coherent book. The Theatrum was immensely popular in spite of its high price' which accounts for its numerous editions. After the death of Ortelius the centre of cartographic activity shifted from his native Antwerp to the Northern Netherlands, notably Amsterdam. Interest in the later editions of the Theatrum dropped off, possibly due to Ortelius' outspoken interest in the
geography of Roman times which led to the historical supplement to his atlas (the Parergon), sometimes issued separately. After 1612 the plates for the atlas were no longer used except for the world map.2 The same fate was shared by the Parergon after 1624. The Theatrum has been described as one of the major milestones in the history of cartography.3

METHOD AND RESULTS: ATLASES
The method described below to establish production and
survival data on Ortelius' cartographical material will first be applied to his atlases and subsequently to the maps extracted from them. Ortelius is also known to have published some maps prior to the appearance of the Theatrum, but these will not be included here. Atlas edition identification and map identification is based throughout on Cornelis Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici, Volume III, (1969), pp.25-70. Although this does not contain the data needed for the present analysis, it does provide an excellent framework and starting-point.



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