Facsimile in colour of the 1570/1572 German Ortelius/Koler atlas
Johann Koler of Nurnberg bought an unknown but small number of copies of the 1570 Latin Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, took the atlas apart, translated the Latin texts into German, glued the translated texts onto the backside of the maps and rebound the atlas in plano. Two copies of this version have survived, one now in the State Library in Berlin, the other in the Anna Amalia library in Weimar. This last-mentioned copy was used for the facsimile.
The facsimile has been produced in the ordinary classical form, with the middle of the map at the spine of the book. The German map texts are presented after the maps, with comments in German for each map by the editor, Ute Schneider, who also gives an introduction to Ortelius’and his atlas, and a modest bibliography.
The title page with Ortelius’name and the address to the reader have been omitted, and the Catalogus Auctorum is given after the maps, not before as in the Theatrum.
All maps are colored.
The publisher is WBG, Darmstadt, Germany, 2006.
Instead of Ortelius’allegorical title page, an equally allegorical engraving after a drawing by Jost Amman serves as the title page. Yet, this is not a “pirated edition” as Karrow (1993) claims. Koler bought the maps from Ortelius or his publisher in a regular way, and had additional expenses for making the translation and printing it. When Ortelius published his first German edition (with popular, rather than scientific texts, whereas this atlas contains the scientific texts translated into German), it pushed Koler’s more expensive version from the market.
The facsimile is beautifully bound in hard covers in red linen, and the front cover shows a reduced version of the first world map (Ort1.1) and below it: GEDRUCKT ZU NUERNBERG DURCH JOHANN KOLER ANNO MDLXXII which in fact only applies to the text pages, not to the maps.
Price: Euro 195 plus shipping (about 2.5 kg)