in. C.IVLII Solini [Polyhistora] Enarrationes. - MELA, Pomponius - Joachim Vadianus. Libri De Situ Orbis Tres,... by SOLINUS, Caius Julius (second half 3rd-century AD) - CAMERS, Giovanni Ioannis (1468-1546) - 1520

Vienna: Johannes Singrenius for Lucas Alantse, 1520., 1520. THE FIRST AVAILABLE PRINTED MAP TO BEAR THE NAME AM ERICA Two works in one volume. Folio (11 6/8 x 8 2/8 inches). Cordiform woodcut world map, woodcut title-page borders, historiated initials, printer's mark, both works include the final blank leaf. Contemporary limp vellum (sewn on three pairs of pink tawed thongs, early manuscript liners, early ink title and traces of early manuscript paper label on spine, evidence of two fore-edge ties (some minor restoration to covers); modern cloth clamshell box. This volume, actually comprises two works within a single binding, in an instance of a common sixteenth-century book-collecting practice. Both are rare works of signal importance, with the present examples in extraordinary condition. The first is Joannes Camers' edition of the Polyhistor, an ancient treatise on natural history by Caius Julius Solinus (flourished ca. 250 AD). After Ptolemy, Solinus was the classical authority whose writings most strongly informed Renaissance geographical thought. Camers's version of the Polyhistor is quite desirable to collectors, for it contains the earliest obtainable map to name America: Peter Apian's splendid double-page map of the world, at the left of which the new continent appears prominently labeled. Apian, a professor of mathematics at Vienna and Ingolstadt, based his map on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 rendering, the only surviving example of which is in the Library of Congress. Waldseemüller's map supported Amerigo Vespucci's revolutionary concept that the New World was a separate continent, previously unknown to the Europeans, and his was the first map to show a separate Western Hemisphere with the Pacific as a separate ocean. Although Waldseemüller himself had realized, after 1507, that Vespucci was not the discoverer of the New World, Apian's duplication of his predecessor's nomenclature etched the name America into popular consciousness. The second book is an equally marvelous example of a key work published by the same Viennese press: Joachim Vadianus's edition with commentary of the first-century AD treatise by Roman geographer Poponius Mela. This 1518 edition also contains Vadianus's letter to his colleague, the Swiss humanist Rudolf Agricola, in which he outlines the geographical problems posed by the recent discovery of the New World and upholds Waldseemüller's decision to name the continent in honor of Vespucci. This treatise, therefore, was also highly influential in directing popular opinion and in bestowing upon the New World the name that it bears to this day. REFERENCES: Lloyd Arnold Brown, The World Encompassed, exh. cat. (Baltimore, 1952), n. 61; Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World (London, 1983), n. 45; Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America: A List of Printed Maps 1511-1670 (Rickmansworth, 1996), xxiv-v..