1916 · Maps
Antique Animal Distribution Maps of the Americas after Wallace, 1916
$85
€75 · dollar price at today's exchange rate
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Shipping to the United States: $50 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.
- Date
- 1916
- Kind
- Maps
- Technique
- Lithograph
- Color
- Uncolored
- Size
- 16 × 24.5 cm (6.3 × 9.6 in)
- Condition
- Good. Even age toning. Slight wear at the bottom left corner.
- Period
- The Twentieth Century
- Reference
- BG-06668-40
What the condition grades mean
- Excellent
- Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
- Very good
- Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
- Good
- Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
- Fair
- Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.
Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.
Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.
Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured.
Delivery and import charges.
About this piece
This original antique thematic map was printed in black and gray tones by the Bibliographisches Institut for Meyers Physikalischer Handatlas. The sheet shows North and South America, animal distribution. It is lettered on the stone in German, Verbreitung der Tiere in Nordamerika. What makes it worth hanging: the Nearctic and Neotropical regions mapped side by side after Alfred Russel Wallace, Emil Deckert, Richard Lydekker and Eduardo Holmberg.
The map comes from Meyers Physikalischer Handatlas, fifty one maps of oceanography, morphology, geology, climatology, plant and animal geography and ethnology, published by the Bibliographisches Institut in Leipzig and Vienna in 1916. The atlas was the physical geography companion to Meyers Grosses Konversations-Lexikon, the great German encyclopedia of the period, and it was assembled from the best specialist sources the house could reach, among them the Berghaus physical atlas, Alexander Supan, Julius Hann and Oscar Drude. The Bibliographisches Institut, founded by Joseph Meyer at Gotha in 1826 and based in Leipzig from 1874, ran its own lithographic and cartographic department, which is why the line work is so clean and the lettering stays legible at this scale.
A thematic map of this kind does something a political map cannot. It takes one idea, the temperature of the sea, the age of the rocks, the spread of a plant family or a people, and lays it over the whole of the Americas in tone, so the pattern reads from across a room. The 1916 date puts the sheet at the end of the long German tradition of physical cartography that began with Heinrich Berghaus, and it records the world as German science understood it on the eve of the modern surveys. Framed in a plain dark molding with a generous off white mat it hangs well in a study, a library, a hallway or an office, and it groups handsomely with other sheets from the same atlas because they share a format and a palette.
Even age toning. Slight wear at the bottom left corner.
This is an original antique map, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.
