The World of Gerard Mercator, The Mapmaker who Revolutionised Georgraphy

Taylor, Andrew

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Language: English

Published by HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2004

0007100809 / 9780007100804

  • First Edition
  • Hardcover
  • Used
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Seller: The Print Room, Cockernhoe nr Luton, United KingdomThe Print Room

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Hardcover

Condition: Used - Near fine

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First edition, first impression with '1' on copyright page. Some very slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, suspicion of bruising to top corners, not price clipped (£16.99), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg++ copy. 291pp, illustrated. In' Mercator' Andrew Taylor chronicles both the story of a great astronomer and mathematician, who was condemned to death as a heretic and the history of that most fascinating conjunction of science and art, the drawing of maps. Gerard Mercator was born in Flanders in 1512. In addition to creating accurate globes of the earth and the stars, he was the first person to use latitude and longitude for navigation and he created the most used map of all time, Mercator's Projection is still the standard view of the world, the one we all envisage when we think of a map of the globe. Simply finding the best solution to the impossible challenge of reproducing the spherical world on a flat sheet of paper was a considerable achievement in itself – something geographers and map-makers had been trying to do for centuries, but Mercator also created the map of the world that would form the basis of the modern age, an image of the continents for the common man. Until Mercator's Projection, maps offered a pictorial encyclopaedia to an illiterate world, and that world stretched far beyond the knowledge and travels of most mapmakers. It is this evolution of mapmaking from art to science that forms the backdrop to the story of Mercator, from the days of Herodotus and Strabo when fabulous creatures were supposed to inhabit the fringes of the world to the great mappae mundi of Hereford and Ebsdorf. The Greek geographer Pytheas claimed to have visited the far north of Britain to establish the limits of the habitable world, but further north, he claimed that the earth, air and sea coalesced into a jellyfish like gelatinous suspension which made life impossible. 'Mercator' promises to be a fascinating history for the general reader, describing as it does how our world view came into being.…

Seller Inventory # 009082

Title
The World of Gerard Mercator, The Mapmaker who Revolutionised Georgraphy
Author
Taylor, Andrew
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers, London
Publication year
2004
Condition
Near Fine
Dust jacket
Near Fine
Binding
Hardcover
Language
English
ISBN 10
0007100809
ISBN 13
9780007100804
Illustrator
Jacket after Franz Hogenberg
Edition
1st Edition
Printing
1st Printing
Dimensions
8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall

The Print Room

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