This article is aimed at all those who are starting to collect, or are wondering how to set about it. However, it could apply equally to established map collectors looking for new directions. The advice is based on many years of collecting experience by Rodney Shirley. In this article he describes the build-up or anatomy of his recent collection of cartographic title-pages and frontispieces rather than maps but the same principles and lessons apply to both.

by Werner Löwenhardt with comments by Rodney W. Shirley.

IN JUNE 1982 a collector friend, Wilco Poortman, told me about a rare discovery of two identical Dutch Protestant bibles published in 1660 which contained two totally different sets of maps. One contained a set of five maps by Nicholaes Visscher dated 1642, which were common in that period, but the other contained a set of maps, one signed by Danckerum Danckerts, dated later, which gave him that 'special' feeling collectors get when they sense a real discovery.

During a visit to Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, in 1991 members of the International Map Collectors' Society glimpsed, amongst other cartographic treasures, a rare sixteenth century atlas of Italian maps; a so-called "Lafreri" atlas[1]. Very few of these Italian atlas factice are known in private hands, and this example is exceptional in that all the maps are in outstanding contemporary colour. The atlas had been in the hands of the Cecil family, the owners of the house, since Elizabethan times. Following the visit. Rodney Shirley was invited to collate the atlas more fully and relate its contents to others of the same genre.

In the recent exhibition 'Fake? The Art of Deception' at the British Museum, there were two maps among the hundreds of other faked or forged objects on display. These were the Vinland map and William Stukeley's well known map of Roman Britain, believed to have been produced by one Richard of Cirencester in 1338. Stukeley's map, engraved in 1757, was based on information sent to him from Copenhagen by Charles Bertram. The unfinished saga of the Vinland map, which is brought up-to-date by Helen Wallis elsewhere in this issue, revolves around the authenticity of the existing map as a physical artifact. The credibility of the Stukeley-Bertram map belongs to a different order of deception and is well worth while recounting, nearly 250 years after the event[1].

This article is an edited version of a talk given by the author in Athens in October last to the Society for Hellenic Cartography at the 1989 Symposium of the International Map Collectors' Society. Rodney Shirley is author of Mapping of the World and Early Printed Maps of the British Isles 1477-1650 and Printed Maps of the British Isles, 1650-1750.

Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's map of the world c.1720 based on astronomical observations, was in advance of its time in scientific content. Here, Rodney Shirley, author of Mapping of the World, Early Printed Maps of the British Isles 1477-1650 and its' recent sequel Printed Maps of the British Isles 1650-1750, examines this unusual map and shows in a table how accurate were Doppelmayr's calculations for latitude and longitude.

In the first part of this article in Issue 41 of TMC the author, himself a collector of title-pages, looked at the five main types of decorative frontispieces - ornamental, compartmental, architectural, pictorial and cartographical. Here, he makes a deeper examination of their content which, to use his own words, 'opens up a veritable Pandora's box of influences, subtle meanings and relationships.'

MANY OF THE fields covered in this second part will be familiar to the classicist or art historian but will be relatively new to the majority of amateur map collectors. Indeed, study of the decorative content of maps themselves has received only limited study.

To illustrate the varied content of title-pages I have grouped their main influences under six headings: classical mythology; Renaissance art forms; Christian theology; allegories, images and emblems; symbols of power; science, discovery and exploration.

IN THIS ARTICLE, I shall explain the form and the meaning of the decorative cartographic title-page. using the term 'title-page' loosely to embrace the frontispiece which may also be an integral part of the preliminaries of an atlas or a geographical work with maps. Leaving aside the purely typographical sheet, the engraved title-page nearly always contains messages related to the work's content in symbolical and pictorial form. Sometimes these are far from easy to decipher, requiring a knowledge of the classics, of ancient and period history, of the emblems, images, concepts of the time, and of contemporary discoveries in natural history and science. At this point I must issue a strong disclaimer of my personal qualifications for treading on ground usually reserved for the art connoisseur and historian. But map collecting is fun, especially when its ramifications take the enquirer into uncharted seas.

MOST OF US think of maps as printed sheets of paper. The great majority of maps are indeed reproduced in this way, and paper or vellum has been the natural preferred material first for manuscript maps and then for nearly all printed representations of the earth's surface. There are however a host of interesting maps in alternative materials, sometimes in forms which have a distinct and separate functional use. Among these are tables of silver, glass or wood, coffers and cabinets, floor mosaics, wall coverings and doors, tapestries and screens, ewers and caskets, and dishes or plates of fired porcelain.

The maps described in this article span two hundred years of cartographic development starting in the sixteenth century. During this time map makers experimented with a variety of map projections including the polar projection as described here. Rodney Shirley, who recently became a Senior Civil Servant in London, studies maps in his spare time and what began as mere interest has increased to become a totally absorbing hobby in which he is now an acknowledged expert. He has just finished a full scale carlo-bibliography of printed world maps which it is hoped will be published later this year. Some of the maps noted in his article are extremely large, and so we have illustrated certain parts only rather than attempt to reduce the whole map photographically and lose much of the decorative engraving.