Sold for £670,000: the first view of England's geography
Friday, 16 March 2007
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A rare copy of the first printed atlas of England and Wales sold for £669,600 at auction yesterday.
The atlas was completed in 1579 - but printing was delayed until 1590 to prevent the Spanish getting information about the English coastline. It is a landmark in Elizabethan cartography, mapping England and Wales in their entirety for the first time. It was created by a surveyor called Christopher Saxton, who was born in Dunningley, West Yorkshire.
The atlas is bound with a rare set of five maps by the Italian cartographer, Giovanni Battista Boazio. They illustrate Sir Francis Drake's expedition to the West Indies and America between 1585 and 1586, and include a view of St Augustine, in Florida, which is the earliest printed plan of any city in the US.
The auction at Sotheby's was part of the sale of the library of the Earls of Macclesfield. The identity of the purchaser of the Elizabethan atlas was not revealed by the auction house yesterday.
Sotheby's travel book and map expert, Richard Fattorini, said the map was remarkably accurate: "Saxton used trigonometry to calculate the distances between two sites. He had lots of people helping him.
"Queen Elizabeth I gave him a document he could show to any nobleman or gentleman to say she commanded them to help him."
Although none of Saxton's notes survive to tell exactly how he created the maps, it is believed he often relied on locals to take him to a vantage point, from where they pointed out towns and villages.
Mr Fattorini said: "It was an amazing achievement in six years to produce all this."
Some areas of the atlas are not so accurate, Mr Fattorini said: "Cornwall is slightly crooked, but he tweaked it to fit it on the page. We are not sure if he got it wrong or if he just... tweaked it and thought no one else would know."
The atlas was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder. The price was the highest ever paid for a volume of Saxton's first printed Atlas of England and Wales, which was the first atlas of any country to map individual counties.
The last copy of the Saxton Atlas of England and Wales which was bound with a set of Boazio charts was auctioned for £1,100 by Christie's London more than 50 years ago.
It was the ninth sale which Sotheby's has held from the library of the Earls of Macclesfield and raised the largest total - £3.9m. The total from the nine sales is £20.3m, making it the most valuable library that Sotheby's London book department has ever sold.
