Atlas Maior And My New Hobby
Quite by chance it appears my latest hobby is collecting interesting books. I’m not really the collecting type, as the only things I’ve collected since my teenage years have been the rather banal DVDs and CDs everyone tends to accrue. With books, however, I’m beginning to feel a little like a real collector, gaining an appreciation of the qualities to look for in a book, and collecting books that are not necessarily interesting to me in terms of content, but in mere feel or aesthetics.
With all this in mind, and after having accrued a lot of TASCHEN’s cheaper (sub £50) books, I decided I wanted to begin collecting some of their higher level books. As a child I was always fascinated by maps (still am, really) so the ideal place to start seemed, to me, to be the gigantic, “ultimate map” Atlas Maior.
Note: All thumbnails are clickable to larger versions.
Atlas Maior is large. It’s 29cm wide (a foot, more or less), 44cm tall, and 3.5 inches thick (inches are still superior for thickness, I feel). It comes in its own box (above) which got a little smashed up in transit, but did its job well in keeping the book in pristine condition.
Above is the book itself in its box with a CDR positioned below for size reference.
The production qualities of the book are incredible. Each of the 600 or so pages are well typeset and the transfer from the original 1665 atlas by Joan Blaeu is well done with no obvious artefacts. The paper is thick, though, sadly, rather glossy. Such a book would have lent itself more to a variety of papers, more textures, and so forth, although this would have undoubtedly doubled the price.
There are a large number of “fold outs” which effectively double the area you need to appreciate the book.
Each significant section of the atlas (Europa, Africa, etc.) begins with an incredible, classic style fold out poster. Unfortunately these are integrated with the book and not removable for wall use.
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