MERCATOR, GERARD (Gerard de Cremere el. Kremer).
5/3 1512- 2/12 1594. Född i Rupelmonde i Flandern, död i Duisburg.
Belgisk-tysk geograf. Från 1530 studerade han vid universitetet i Leuven under astronomen och kartografen Gemma-Frisius (se denne), och var dennes assistent under arbetet med hans jordglob. Hans första självständiga arbete, en Palestinakarta från 1537, finns det idag bara en känd kopia av. Lika sällsynta är flera av hans andra tidigaste arbeten. År 1541 konstruerade han en jordglob över jordklotet och en himmelsglob, båda på uppdrag av kejsare Karl V. År 1552 slog han sig ned i Duisburg där han sedan fortsatte sin verksamhet. 1569 gav han ut en liten bok om kronologi och samma år kom hans framstående världskarta. 1578 gav han ut Ptolemaeus geografi, kompletterad med sina egna kartor. Detta verk kom i 7 nyutgåvor, den senaste 1794. Mercator är ansedd som den mest betydelsefulla geografen sedan Ptolemaeus. Hans främsta verk, 'Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi' utkom första gången 1585 och slutfördes 1595, en kort tid efter hans död. Detta arbete var epokavgörande och kom fram till 1642 ut...
Bland arbeten.
Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi.
(Averdunk. - Bagrow. - Nederl. biogr. X.)
Was the most important member of an Augsburg family of artists and publishers. He was the German representative of the 'Vue d'Optique' , a genre of copper engravings showing in the size of this here shown print the architectural 'wonders of the world' to people mainly during fairs. The prints were pushed into a view box and the viewers, one at a time, could look through a lens to see the prints inserted into the box by the operator, for money, of course. There were French, Italian, Spanish, publishers of Vue d'Optique prints. But the most famous and the most true to facts ones came from the Augsburg workshop of G.B. Probst. He produced ca. 400 of them, not only views of places, but also a variety of other subject matters. While most prints of this genre were loudly and heavily colored, a small series was left black and white, truly showing their artistic value beyond the fulfilment of curiosity at fairs.
Kâtip Çelebi, Mustafa bin Abdullah, Haji Khalifa or Kalfa, (1609, Istanbul – 1657 Istanbul)
Kâtip Celebi was an Ottoman scholar. A historian and geographer, he is regarded as one of the most productive authors of non-religious scientific literature in the 17th century Ottoman Empire. Among his best-known works is the Kashf al-?un?n ‘an as?m? al-kutub wa-al-fun?n, ('The Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and the Arts'), a bibliographic encyclopaedia, written in Arabic, which lists more than 14,500 books in alphabetic order.
Life and works
The son of a soldier, he himself was a soldier for ten years until a heritage made him turn to a more contemplative life. As the accountant of the commissariat department of the Ottoman Army in Anatolia, he accompanied the Ottoman army in the campaign against Baghdad in 1625, was present at the siege of Erzurum, and returned to Istanbul in 1628. In the following year he was again in Baghdad and Hamadan, and in 1633-34 at Aleppo, whence he made the pilgrimage to Mecca (hence his title Hajji). The following year he was in Erivan and then returned to Consta...
Bland arbeten.
Cihannüma (The mirror of the world) Constantinople, Ibrahim Müteferrika, 1732. First edition.
This is the second work by Kâtip Celebi published in 1729. The author was a well known writer on history and geography and a bibliophile and in this work intended to publish a universal system of geography. In fact only part of the work (including the description of Asia Minor) was completed by Kâtip who used European and Arabic and Persian sources, and the whole was supplemented and edited by Ibrahim, who dedicated it to the grand vizir of Sultan Mahmud II, Ali Pasha.
The picture is showing the map of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea that was engraved in 1728 by the Hungarian-born Ottoman cartographer and publisher Ibrahim Müteferrika; it is one of a series that illustrated Katip Çelebi’s Cihannuma (Universal Geography), the first printed book of maps and drawings to appear in the Islamic world.
Ingermanlandiae – Homanns Erben 1734
'Map of China and Japan with adjacent parts of Soviet Russia...' - Stanford 1930.
