Welcome to the Georgia Tech Libraries rare books spotlight featuring your own blouse Scruton atlas. They will be taking a virtual look at three volumes of the atlas featuring maps and the Americas, Northern Europe, Africa, and Asia. My name is Alison Reynolds. I'm the research services and instruction archivist at the Georgia Tech Library and I'm joined by Jim Sowell, astronomer and Observatory director at the Georgia Tech School of Physics. And Nick Wildling, professor and associate chair of History at Georgia State University. Before we get started, I want to acknowledge and thank the people helping behind the scenes. We have Katie Gentilello, our digital projects coordinator as our production lead who's going to be filming me as we look at the books, we have Quincy Thomas as our AV IT support who's going to help run blue jeans and Catherine Manci, our public programming and Community Engagement Librarian, who coordinated the event is good and is going to be moderating the Q and a. But I will start us off by giving a little overview of the rare book collection at Georgia Tech and then some background information about the Blau atlas. And then point out some of my favorite maps and illustrations that I use when teaching with Alice classes. After that, Jim is going to talk about astronomer Tycho Brahe. He, and his relationship to the ball Alice. And then Nick will talk about book printing and engraving, followed by the impact of the atlas on the history of cartography, trade and European colonialism. Though, I'm going to go ahead and talk a little bit. The rare book collection here at Tech. Our collection largely focuses on the history of science with strings in astronomy, physics, mathematics, engineering and architecture. Our currently working to acquire but more books that will enhance these areas and also support the current research and teaching needs of Georgia Tech faculty and students. Rare book collection started in earnest and the 950 is by Dorothy crossline, librarian and later vibrate director. She traveled to Europe a lot in the 950 is to acquire new books. And in her words, it was for display purposes and to support the literature of faculty who teach chemistry, mathematics, and physics. So the story with the Blau Alice is that he acquired it during, from someone in Amsterdam. And I was trying to find some provenance research about this because we didn't really know. And yesterday I ran across somebody's research notes. He suggests that it was purchased from someone named Martinus the Huff. It was a Dutch poet, pretty famous, and his grandfather started a publishing company and 853 and also had a rare book trade. So the story is that she talked to me Hoff, and offered him $25 thousand for the Alice and shoulder. It wasn't for sale. But said that if he was going to solid, you would sell it to her. I'm sorry. Library reports indicate that was purchased in 1965 for $10,145. But we know Huff die in 1953, so she probably got it from his sign and maybe he gave her discounted rate regardless. We add it, we got a pretty good deal on it. It was bought in memory of Mary how? Our Gilbert, who was the wife of gilbert, that the library building here is aimed after. So our copy of the atlas, It's the nine volume such language Atlas, published in Amsterdam around 1664, 1665. This image on the PowerPoint you can see berth across from the 160s. I'm looking at the atlas. The article said that she just kept them in a sac in the corner of her office, though, different from how we keep them now, but we're glad that they survived as long as they have. So as I said, this atlas contains about 3300 pages and 600 maps. So I have it over here. It's a folio with in color copper plate engravings bound and read Moroccan leather with a gold gilded edges. We think it's such bookbinder Albert Magnus, though. It's very large and very heavy. I'll tilt it here. If you can see the engraving on the line or the atlas. Though, this atlas at the time was the largest map publishing project in the world. And really one of the largest and most expensive books that you could buy in the 17th century. It has upper and great plate engravings and I want to show you a map of the world here. So this was really one of the first books to show the world as a Hemisphere. Prior to this, they were largely flat. And this is a really interesting illustration from an artistic standpoint. Who's-who we have the figures at the top of classical gods with the sun god, Apollo in the middle. Here. And then on the sides, on the left. Looks like Galileo and I read them. Consider that to be Galileo or just a stand-in for an astronomer. And then on the right side was supposedly teak Tycho Brahe. He was much younger than the portraits I've seen of him. But also thought it could just be a stand-in for a geographer with his compass around the world. And then at the bottom is our allegorical illustrations of the four seasons. So spring, summer, fall, and winter. We pan across. We turn to the title page. Though, this atlas was printed by the Blau printing company, which was founded by owns both wows father William in Amsterdam in 1599. So well, and Bois was a famous cartographer. He also, but he also created terrestrial and celestial globes and astronomical instruments. To before establishing himself as a cartographer and printmaker, he spent several years studying under Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe at his observatory. Both your random board on the island of then in Scandinavia, where he learned Cosmo graphy and that making sales that helped him establishes business. After William died in 1638, yawning bouts of over as fathers printing business as well as position of chief cartographer of the Dutch East India Company. I was during this time he compiled and published his magnum opus Atlas my r, which is meant to illustrate the land, sea, and sky as it was known. So here's the title page and we have the printers mark here and printed in Amsterdam by Johann Blau and the date on here is 664. Bone. It turned back to the front. And there's a really, really cool illustration, pretty famous here that I want to show. This is just after the title page. And this illustration is an allegorical representation of the continents gathered around the woman and a chariot pulled by lions. Each continent is represented by an allegorical figure and animal representing that geographic location. So we have the Americas here with an armadillo, that Europe wearing a crown with a horse. Asia over here with a camel, and then Africa with an elephant in the back. I did a little bit of research to figure out who the woman and the chariot is. And I found that it's largely consider that she is roman Freudian goddess Sibley, who was pretty much always depicted with lions, often in a chariot pulled by lions where your crown, just like this image, he was a, an earth goddess, mother of wild nature. Though in this illustration, she represents of the world and the key and her hand is the key to the knowledge of the world. Though presumably you as the owner of this atlas, have the key to the knowledge of the world and your hand. I'm going to move over to volume eight. I have a few maps right here. This first one is the Americas, north and South America, both just called the Americas. The maps in the atlas is they're drawn from sources coming in from across Europe, like Spain, France, England, Germany in Portugal. It's important to note that while I was drawing the maps himself or writing the text, but acquiring them from other cartographers and getting the rights to print them. Italy gathering the maps, illustrations, and texts for a variety of sources and then binding them together by geographic location. Though, each section also contains text that describes the people and climate and customs of the region. So each section contains a display, a map about that part of the world, and that's what this map here is. So in addition to the continents here, you can see this shit. They have flags on them. See, you can see which countries were probably around this area, looks like France or here. And there's also see monsters, just some little fun illustrations, sea monsters. And then there are illustrations on the corners that show the indigenous people or European travelers, explorers went and your illustrations of the indigenous people. So that's along the side. And then the top also has some illustration of the prominent cities here in the Americas. And then we have Havana in Mexico City. As you move and lend on the map, you can see some of the geographical features that they were aware of. Like rivers, I think the Rio Grande rigorous here in South America. Some cities that they knew about. But it's important to note that all of these are from a European perspective, and that most of these maps from the Americas were from 69 to 1647. So much earlier than when the atlas is printed. So I'm going to move on to Asia. Paint that out. Just a couple of things about the map. Though. Again, we have the people along the sides in the cities at the top. A couple of interesting things. Korea, they have as little peninsula here. And you'll see that my god. There's no Australia at the bottom. So the first European explorers and Australia were 1606. But the continent was not fully charged it until later and into the 1700s. So this was left, this map was printed in 1617, So Australia was left out. Though. Another interesting thing, as you can see, that they were aware of the Northwest passage here. So we see the corner of the Americas, or I'll ask up here in the passage. So I'm going to go back to the first volume so we can transition into the next part of the talk. So I'm gonna go back to this because in Northern Europe volume is where Tycho Brahe, he's Observatory was located. You remember earlier I mentioned that he studied or BLM, wow, studied under Tycho Brahe and in 95. That because of this connection, there are a lot of illustration of the Observatory and some of the astronomical tools here. So that in mind, I'm going to transition over and let Jim talk about high. There we go. Thank you, Allison. Let me give a little historical perspective on Tycho Brahe. First, though, everyone has heard of Copernicus. The next astronomer who really came along was a combination of Chico bra Hey, who was born into that. He was a nobleman, the butt into the middle of his life. He realized he really didn't care for the typical lifestyle of the nobility, and he became very interested in astronomy. And eventually he got the king to build this observatory complex for him. The Tico was a great observer and I'll come to those aspects in a second. But his, one of the final people to work with him was Kepler, who was a theorist. And Kepler took the next gap, which was saying that the orbits of objects are not perfect circles. Yes, that's the observatory complex. Hebrew was basically in charge of that whole island. But Kepler came along and really made the important aspects of understanding orbits. And Kepler and Galileo were contemporaries. So Tycho's work was pre telescopic. And if you'll go to that next picture, the important one that I want everyone to say. I think this atlas in many ways to me I realizing is more of an encyclopedia. Because not only is it an atlas, but it was talking about the peoples and animals. And here was a big section on instruments. And I want to show you how t goes observatory worked in Tico, realized that wind was becoming a problem. And so this was actually a couple of stories down into the ground. But you see this great big brass arc, the semicircle. So what Pico? Yes, that's it. And there's Tico. She just ran her finger over him. He's the one pointing at. He was able to get superior positions of stars. He got about a 1000 done in his lifetime. And the way astronomers did it back then and continue to do it into, well into the 1800s. Was you had a telescope that only could move in latitude, but it was pointed exactly on the meridian. And most people don't realize it, but astronomers, We're your clock people where you wear your time keepers. Though the idea is there is this ring and pico is pointing to a star and there is a man to the right. It gives you pull the page back just a little bit, Alice. And there's a man whose face is up against the ring. And so he's got a little, That's it. It'll have a little perpendicular piece. And so he's having to get the right angle pointed and he's waiting and waiting until the star is exactly on the meridian. And then down below there is a boy, though, the man, I call this the hey Joe method. The man is going to yell. Now. The boy is going to read the time. And then over to the left of the boy is the scribe who was going to write down the latitude of the star and the time the star was on the meridian. And Tycho's observations, you're able to repeat this. It's not like you only could do with once he could do this over and over again. And his observations were about ten times better than what any previous astronomer was able to do. And it's because of that higher precision that Kepler was actually able to see that the orbits of, the orbit of Mars in particular was not circular, but deviated slightly from it because most orbits, except for comments. Are not very much of a deviation from a circular orbit. Back to. There are other pictures in the atlas if you happen to come by and see it, if you can zoom in on the upper right little one. It's red. There you go. You're getting close. But that come down or that I love is books come down and a little to the left. And you see two people looking through that triangle. That is an old fashion sextant for looking and trying to get the angle of the sun. It's above. Because hand, though, I just love that page. And this is classic picture of Tico that you will see in any astronomy textbook. And this is about all there really is. I've him. But he was a fascinating guy. He really didn't want his life to go for nothing. He said that even at his deathbed and his collection of data is very important for a great start of improving our astronomical understanding. And I'll leave you with finally one little tidbit about Tico. It's not in this drawing. But when he was 20 years old, he had a duel and he lost part of his nose, the bridge of his nose. And so the rest of his life, he had a brass knows. It sounds like you had a silver and gold 12. Special occasion by the brash midst of youth kinda got him into trouble. But then for the rest of his life later, he was really turned out to be a great scientist. And we're very thankful. Unfortunately, that Observatory doesn't exist anymore. It was destroyed by the next gang who had a falling out with geek out. But I think the Danes and the Swedes are actually have made a replica up there on the site. How Alice and back to you now or in the turnover to your neck to talk about the history and the impact on that. And pack of cartography and European colonialism. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what the book is, how it came to be, what it is, kind of what, what it was full. So we're looking at the Dutch tradition of the great atlas. It's greater than all of his competitors atlases and everything that he'd done before. And this claim that this is somehow like the definitive, the best, the biggest, the most accurate. It should be taken with a little pinch of salt, as we'll see next slide, please. Though, it's more or less simultaneously. Blau undertook this massive printing project, though 1662 through to 1667, basically over 50 span. These producing these multi-volume global atlases. And this is not even old, he was aiming to print. This was the terrestrial. What was meant to be, as Jim said, the kind of complete knowledge that was supposed to be a cosmological section of an astronomical section as well. I never appeared just to get a sense of the kind of scale of these things. So we'd have the Latin volume, a Latin edition, and 11 volumes compared year off by French. And then the Dutch will know we're looking at, we think that these will OLED printed in a minimum of about 300 co-pays and it may have been up to about 500 corpus. And then we have German and Spanish editions, which are a little more difficult to understand those more earlier material incorporated into those additions. We know a little bit about what happens to these books, how they were given as gifts. The, the show up in very weird places that are given to foreign Lee, those boats within Europe and outside Europe. The given to like pirates and weird people that the Dutch trying to impress with these gifts. And they're also sold commercially. And these aren't particularly rare, although there's no full census of x and coppice. But we have a fairly high survival rate if the print editions were numbered about three to 500 copies. Additions. If we have a 100 cups of Latin, that's high survival, right? There's a mulch. So amongst book people, the good books, lingo Longa. You'll, paperbacks get trashed, but you'll get expensive books get put on a shelf and nobody ever looks at them. Let's move on to the next slide, please. So I'd just like to go into some of the kind of technologists very briefly that are used to produce this book so that we can understand the labor that's involved in the material manufacturing of the book. So here we are live with the same image. So this is the Overview of Africa. If we go into the edge, any edge of this image and let the camera kind of focus. I just want you to just see, to think about how this image is produced. So can you see that beyond the printed image, there's a slight kind of impression that, and that's the plates press. Though each of these large maps is engraved on a sheet of metal, scratched into the surface of the metal, and then printed onto a large sheets of paper. That's a lot of work. And when there's no color printing of these images, these are the printed in black ink on white paper. And then each, each individual copy is hand colored. So those variation between coppers, because there's no kind of paint by numbers guide to how to, to do this necessarily. So you get, you get variations. And there are also different kinds of levels of dumped attitudes. So some, some of the copies have build leaf applied. This copy actually has some, some gold leaf. So all of the maps are engravings. We go back to the PowerPoint, please. Here's a contemporary illustration of how engravings produce. This is a French image by Abraham, both from the WHO, where are we about 1645, I think here on the left we have somebody etchings. But that's the easier way to make a copper plate image. You, you scratch through a layer of wax and then pour acid on to the plate. And the acid does the creates the the biting hole in the, in the play that you can then smear with ink, like take the wax off first and smearing can then push really, really hard with the press and the ink will come off onto the paper. The guy on the right is doing what, what we're looking at here. He's engraving. We go to the next, Next slide, please. And this is how these images are then printed. You need a very high pressure press. And the guy with his hands, he boots, putting all his weight onto this thing to get the, get the plates are run through this press is printing a single sheets, single image. If we go to next next slide please. Other technology does he use in this book is used to produce the texts that there's a division and I don't think the mix together a tool. And in this, in this book, you can, you can print both text and image on a single piece of paper. But if you're using plates, then you need to pass it through the press, two different presses. So this is how type printing is done. The guy sitting kind of close to the front is taking out individual pieces of type, composing text, putting them into our composite to stick and then assembling a page of text and then assembling the multiple pages that make a form. And then the form is transferred to a press. Ink is applied to it. A piece of paper is laid over it. And then that big machine on the right-hand side, WE current still leave up, pulls down that heavy weight pressure is applied and you get a printed sheets of paper or you got one site but a sheet of paper printed. If we go to next slide, please. I'm just trying to stress how laborious book production is, the sheer labor and the capital costs that are involved here. So if we think that the, the atlas model, just in the Latin, French, Dutch, and Dutch additions, don't really know very much about the germinal Spanish ones. They seem to be more kind of cannibalized from other books. It's being calculated and this might be idealizing things a little bit because there are other materials and in bold here. But the kind of minimum labor is something like this. We have with a fairly small edition size, 300 copies per language. We have 10 thousand pages of text, though that composites is pulling out letter by letter and 1000 pages of texts. That means 5 thousand folio sheets. Plus there are 600 engravings per, per set of atlases. Total for these three language editions, that means 1.7 million sheets of paper. We used to produce 300 copies of each edition and it might have been that there were 500 corpus we dine out. And so it's been calculated that that's about 30 thousand hours of printing going at a speed, working 10 hours a day and not taking weekends off. And for the maps because those presses are slower to use because they you just need to kind of inking the plates takes longer and wiping them off and get everything to the right temperature. 54 thousand hours for the map printing. It's for years and years of labor. So what's really remarkable about this is that it exists at all. With in order to produce this, Blau had assembles the largest print shop in the world at that 0.9 presses, letterpress presses working at. So if those are working at 50 sheets and now which is barely fairly quick work, heels had six engraving presses. So there are different kinds of machines working at ten sheets an hour. Though we're talking a few years to print these additions. And remember, just think about the amount of capital that has to be a mast. To produce these, these things. You've got all the labor of composing the text, doing the engravings, buying all the paper, hang the work them through these years and years of labor. And you've got nothing to sell until the book is produced. Printing isn't the end of it. Printers done my books right? Printers print sheets of paper. So in this case, all of the images, or most, most copies have hand colored maps. You could get black and white ones a little cheaper than the fancy ones have gilding in there. And then this is weird for a 17th century book. Something that we think of as totally normal. You would buy the book bound. Usually for 17th century books, to buy the book in a temporary binding. And then you yourself as an owner, have it bound to match your other books. Our, our model of buying a book already bound only comes into widespread use in a, really, in the early 19th century, maybe a late 18th. So here we are in the late 17th century. And you bought the set bound at source. We go to the next slide. And this too is a lot of workers assembling the books that we've got all these 1.7 million sheets of paper, and now we have to turn them into books. Usually when you get holds, when you have printed sheets, you would assemble what's called a gathering. So you get several sheets of paper, you nestle one inside the other, and then you go through the middle of onto a support. And then you assemble several of these gatherings. And you build, you build a book. That's how most, most books or might pre-print as well. With these atlas books, because you have these images that you want to not have information beverage into the gutter of the book. You don't want to be wondering what's being lost down in, in the, the bit with the book. You can't really open up. They are all every single sheets of this book. Text and maps are all mounted onto little stubs of paper, little gods and a cardboard stuff. So there's a you can see, so that allows you, when you open the book, you can open the sheet lat. It also allows you to remove the maps. And lots of copies of these books have had the maps removed because they look real pretty on people's walls and you can take these books apart and make more money out of them by mutilating them. So we have this kind of extra labor involved in putting together, turning these sheets into volumes to go to next slide, please print my time for some questions. And so it looks as though you could buy from Blau two different kind of qualities of binding you could have. So top left there, the kind that we have or that you have an attack here. The red Morocco binding with all the gilding. And you may have seen or we could go and have a look afterwards. There was a, in the middle, there's a little medallion with a space left in it where you could then put your monogram or your coach or bombs or your ownership Mach to make your copy and personalize it. You could also get it in vellum. And top right there. Even if you're really fancy, got a custom made display case from the bookseller, that this is a book that comes from the book. Sell it direct to you as a kind of complete presentation set, even with a way to display it. You could also get it accompanied with globes. The blouse, like many other publishers, like Jansen sons, lots of publishers didn't just make what we think of as two-dimensional books. Books are clearly three-dimensional. They also made things like celestial globes, terrestrial globes. Probably also were involved in instrument manufacturer themselves because in sizing Bros is very similar to engraving plates. And so bottom left you see unassembled goals of a celestial, most of a celestial globe. The only extra copy of blouse father. Those are from Harvard. And a on the right and assembles celestial globe. There are various ways of displaying. Using, or maybe displaying is the way that you use this book. This isn't a book that you would take with you. Find your way around the world. Of course, this is a way of possessing the world. Let's move on to the next slide, please. So the, the other kind of field of labor we have to think about when we're looking at these books is what's happening beyond the press. Who the books for, what kind of, what use are they serving? And they, the, the main kind of resource here is the VOC, the largest company in the world, one of the first multinationals, one of the first joint stock companies. Huge 6. And I guess from that point of view, from the start as seventeenth-century right through to 8800, a multinational US are not controlled by the state, independent of the state. And by the time on, Blau is printing these, these atlases, they've got about 2000 ships. They've got 30000 cellulose. They've got the largest private army in the world, 10 thousand soldiers. This is a military operation. They have 50 thousand employees in total. It's massive. Everybody in the low countries and throughout Europe, lots of people are in some way dependent on the VOC. This is the birth of multinational capitalism. This is the one of the tools of globalization and it employs slave labor while herself graded and slaves in the Virgin Islands. So I think it's kind of important to think. This is a beautiful, pretty expensive book, but it both enables and depict the process of globalization. That's not incidental. If you look at the maps, you'll see that what's depicted is there were lots of coastal towns that potential Trade Centers for European traders. But there are also natural resources. There's a kind of transformation at the world from whatever. However, you might conceive of the world. A spiritual place or a series of religious empowered places to a kind of a set of natural resources that are awaiting European exploitation. And so what we, what we see in these books is a kind of pivotal moment there in the 16 sixties. This idea of possessing the world literally in the sense of going out and trading and buying and subjugating and colonizing. But also then kind of symbolically by turning it into a book that you can have up at your home and your library. If you're a wealthy person who's probably profited from the massive profits that the VOC makes you. They average about 20 percent profit a year for the entire two centuries of their existence. And so it's, it's both a, it's a tool of capitalism in, in both, both senses. And I should finish by saying that Blau himself was the official cartographer of the VOC. He made his money by supplying all of those ships with standardized maps. And now he's sucking in that information of VOC cartography and bringing in other sources of cartography. So there are weird things like Jesuit maps of China being brought in. My weird because bile is a, is a Protestant. So they using Catholic knowledge that they're trying to. And a lot of these maps kinda been cannibalized from other atlases. So this is a kind of Frankenstein monster of a world where any souls that, that looks like it's a reasonable similar problem of, of, of the world is deployed to make up a working model of, of a globe that's there, ready to be exploited by the Dutch. That's what Ireland. Let's move on to questions. Or Catherine revenue. We damn our Fang. At first question is, how are the striking hemorrhage is create add white cat accidentally color added by a painter. The images, I think they talked a little bit about that during his presentation, but they were engraved on the copper plates and then put through a press, press down on the copper plates and then the ink would transfer on the paper and then somebody would hand color the map, the images. And it's interesting because they're not all the same. It wasn't a paint by number where they're where they all look the same. I looked at that image with a woman and the chariot, about a half dozen online, and they all have different colored clothing, so each one is a little bit unique in that way. Maker Jim, did you wanna add anything to that? All right. Thanks. Before we move on to the next question, this is Catherine Mansi. I am checking the Q&A and the chat. So if any of our attendees have questions, you are welcome to pop them into either one of those places. Um, the next question is about bra. Though my understanding is that Brahe effectively hedge between the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric I can system can the speaker's comment on that? Because model was designed by committee. He had the moon going around the Earth. He had the planets going around the sign, but he had the sun going around the Earth. Though you either had the Ptolemaic system, which was, everything was going around the Earth. Or you had the Copernican system that everything was going around the sign. And he firmly believed in his model, but it just wasn't there. And on his death bed, supposedly he pleaded with Kepler to make certain everybody learns about my model. And Kepler was like Just give me the data. Your model is terrible. I can come up with the Copernican view was when he was a founder. Firmly behind. I'm not giving you that. I tried to unmute out. You're unmuted. Yeah. Okay. Um, the, the blouse, along with a group of Dutch intellectuals, actually invited Galileo off to the trial in 1633 when Copernicanism was, was pretty much boundless, let's say it out as in Catholic lens. And they invited Galileo to, but to get out of jail somehow or other out of house arrest, then come and live in Amsterdam. He kinda realized that that wasn't a very good idea. That would definitely lead to the stake if he were captured and he was in his 70s. And so he told the inquisition that he'd been asked to do that. They were interested in having him for a variety of reasons. I think part of it was probably to annoy the Inquisition, but also there was an intellectual commitment to Copernicanism that was really taking off in the 16 twenties onwards. When Galileo writes is the oligo and 16, the publishes it in 1632. It's called the dialogue of the two chief world systems. Tycho at that point has dropped out and it's just Ptolemaic and Copernican. He doesn't doesn't want to talk about. Tycho was going to try and make a really big bad guy that we don't talk about teacup. So they od, they have a commitment to Copernicanism. And Bly was actually the first person to publish maps or cosmologists with a pro Copernican commitment. Though the sun is Atlas sense of the depicted as Apollo. And he places the, the planets as God's around Apollo in the correct Copernican. Older though we're in this. So, but there's also this kind of family leg because as Jim said to to Tycho and then and and that legacy. And in the, in the opening, those kind of discussion, you know, it could be this way or it could be this way. But it seems pretty clear. And basically full navigate is, it doesn't matter very much, frankly, but terrestrial navigation, it doesn't change things a whole lot. Well, what cosmology you deploy this stage. We're not GPS and yet and so the yeah, So the, the kind of committed Copernican. But they give it a little nod to the Ptolemaic and the Taconic systems along the light. Thank you for that. Our next question we have quite a few coming, MR. the next question is, are there any, for lack of a better term, pulse place as an atlas or maybe places like mountains and calm. You know, I don't know if there are any completely incorrect ones. I know I showed that map of Asia, whereas Korea as almost an island like Peninsula, which we know is not accurate. But one of the Americas you can see it's really carved and the Gulf of Mexico is really carved into the continent. So it's almost like Florida, Georgia, the whole South. This doesn't exist is the ocean. So we know now that there's much more land and the Southern United States or North America than they did at that time. But haven't looked at all of them closely enough to see if there's anything that's completely wrong. Random Islander, some thanks for the question. The interesting or not. Yeah. Necker jam. Do you now there are any just completely false places. Most of the color graphic material is is pulled in from other sources. So it was there's no intentional deception. It's just kind of what we now think of as inaccurate cartography thing, probably California as an island. And that's because it, it remained an island for a really long time as far as cartographers were concerned. But does no. I don't. One of the weird things is that they're on don't find, say in the interior of Africa, terra incognita, like this. There's a really dense knowledge of most of the world and you don't really see this kind of what you say an older map. So kind of hierarchies of like, well, we know Europe fairly well because we have the Ptolemaic mapping tradition. But we have no idea about, I know that every city in China is, is depicted that because there are these global networks like the VOC, like the Jesuits, like the English East India Company, the West into accompany. This information is flowing into the centers of calculation from all over the place here. An even. Now Tasmania has been discovered. The interior of Australia is still unknown on the southern coast of Australia, but there's no kind of internal deception or even kind of wind. See that. It's turning into something like the modern world. Like it's recognizably a modern atlas. I'm only familiar with a blouse action, but I'm sorry to hear that what is supposed to be an astronomical Atlas and that I would have enjoyed saying, I guess there were other rival books out I like have alias that we're doing it pretty well. But the Jesuits had got on top of this. But by this point I think. Thank you for those great answers. The next question we have about the different number of volumes. So what accounts for the different number of volumes and the different language editions? Neck do you know? Well, the the information, the maps generally repurposed a liver or a different number of maps. They seem to kind of do each edition for different audiences. So the French map has a mole of New France and French imperial holdings in those, each one is cognitive. The world seen from a different point of view. Though the material is reorganized. I don't think the text is just straight translation. I think that the kind of conceive of each edition as the wolf seen Brahman for a different audience. So I guess they chop it up into different sizes. The more number of volumes you have even for the same number of sheets, the greater the cost is going to be. So it might also be that there's a kind of economy of scale and that they, they start off thinking, yeah, there's a physical limit to the number of pages you can comfortably bind into a volume, especially if you it with this complex God system. But probably it's cheaper to sell a nine volume set than an 11 volumes head because you haven't had to pay the binder to do those extra two volumes for each one. So it might just be that they kind of, uh, trying to cut costs a little bit with the, with the Dutch. Well, that's a, that's a really good, good research question. I don't know if anybody has actually gone and kind of co-related the presence of each map in each book and worked out what gets shuffled. Me bureaucratically, this is an insane thing to do. A multilingual nine such well, volume 600, map description of the world. Just think. Just tracking all of those documents in terms of file management. It's it's, um, you're doing it over a 1000 copies. It's kind of amazing that any of these things actually come out, right? Yeah. You know, with that, I'm going to ask the next few questions out of order because I'm interested. But on the next question is, how on earth did they afford this? Like how with 300 copies, recoup the cost then? Do you know how much a set cost? And this is for any of our there is a nice, this book has a lot of the answers. You on Blau and his great atlas. There's also a really lovely book. Jerry brought in, history of the world in 12 maps. You can get a paperback as well. There's a chapter on this book which I drew on heavily for this account. They're all contemporary pricings of these things. It's basically well, somebody, it's basically skilled labor, probably several years salary to these, these are not a toll affordable for the vast majority of people. Nowadays, this set would cost between half a million and one point. I think this one's a price of 1.1 million the set, but it's a nice condition. It probably wasn't a whole lot cheaper back then. Which is kind of shocking. This isn't something that's massively gone up in value. This was a, this was the most expensive book ever published. And lots of these things or given away as gifts though, to people like cold bears a, the guy behind the scenes of Louis the 14th. And so does this. Within the intent of the capital required to produce these things, Blau had made himself a lot of money by being the BOC official cartographer, is he has this basic monopoly on mapping for the entire day. I'll see you in a insists that every ship has like a set of identical maps and he he sets the price that they are invoices from him where he's like, yeah, you only like 0.5 million bucks this week. So the capital is generated by the VOC. And then, and they're pulling in huge amounts of money. And so there's this weird kind of nepotistic or I'm I don't know, maybe, maybe this how UDL I was meant to work, but that's that's where the money's coming from, from the Big-O say on the maps are going probably to Viggo see shareholders as well. Thank you. Here's a very quick question. Um, it's, uh, maybe I missed this, but what does grew 10 mean? Oh, it's the Dutch version, so that's great. Now let's put it translates to grant atlas or are commonly Atlas, my ER. But I've seen question. And this one is a large-scale how, how that allows at my shape. That's the crack cartography. Reed Jerry burden, see what happens next. And he has this as a captcha on like the the the shift to Money basically to get from that. So where are we now with atlases? This is the atlas most was used, right? The whole world fits in there now, whatever scale you want. But from the objections that he's using become fairly standardized. Despite, despite all the controversy over how a projection distorts the world. Made this basically sets a kind of a standards. Then get supplemented by mole greats, a kind of national, more detailed national cartographic projects and imperial projects that you have a resulting in. By the end of 19th century, I think things like the Ordinance Survey mapping of India or the United Kingdom of similar French national an imperial ventures to map, um, and there's also a kind of a weird stubbed text here where VOC maps, maps are also kind of trade secrets, right? If whoever knows what the world looks like has access to it. And especially when you're looking for spice islands in the East Indies. Mapping knowledge is something that's historically tightly, tightly controlled. So the, the Spanish with the great experts on keeping mapping, keeping cartography secret. The last thing you want to do is go and publish it. This venture, that there's some evidence that the VOC, despite being the official cartographer, he had a kind of non-disclosure agreement where he couldn't use the most detailed, most accurate maps. That would give the competitors the edge. Though. I guess, that then shifts into a kind of Enlightenment tension of wanting full disclosure of the world. And opening up those last bastions of kind of private cartographic knowledge or corporate secret cartographic knowledge. And we see that still today, you know, turn on the news and you may well see some satellite footage of Ukraine. There we say private and state but tightly controlled, militarized cartographic knowledge being deployed in real time. That's what happens next, I guess. Thank you so much snack. I think that's a really great large-scale question to end on. I have one more question for each of our panelists before we end today. So my last question is, just what is your favorite thing about the atlas? I know all three of you have had a chance to see it in person. Many times, though. I'll start with you, Jim, what's your favorite thing about the atlas? I like how it is so multi-dimensional and that I like it because there's an astronomy section. My wife Virginia is here today because she's an artist. I wanted her to see the beautiful paintings there. It covers. Yeah, I'm always wanting to learn. And the Atlas lash encyclopedia is the kind of thing that you could open and you would be learning. I liked what Nick said about it. It gives you the world and I like that it's old and it's lasted, announced last a lot longer than I have. But that's kinda bit press it back. What about yeah, I found a worm hole, which I really liked. That sounds weird, but like a little insect to the whole. And the, the thing that I like about it is that it shows because this is so geeky, but this is what book people do. Sometimes it shows that the, It's that the hole goes through. Usually if you find a wormhole, Italy this way up and down through a book and there are different kinds of worms in different directions and you can tell where the book Spain, depending on the, on the wormhole, this is just drew one sheet which normally would make you think that that she has been inserted lights or into the book and taken from another copy and that someone's mucked about with it. But there's no evidence of that in this copy to what it actually means is that she had been printed another book. So I said that some of this book is kinda cannibalized from other Blau publications. The Dutch material comes from an earlier Dutch atlas that he had made and then he repurposing. And because he hasn't been able to sell it, that this thing had been sitting somewhere, a worm had eaten through, and probably the whole stack of other, other ones. You could probably find the same worm hole in different copies around, around the world. And then he took that she and shoved it in this book. And may like my brand new best-selling, most accurate map of the world using these 20 or 15 or 20 year olds match. Though I love the way that like little copy specific bits of evidence like that. Tell you stories about how the thing came to be, how it is. I love fat or Alice, then I'll end with you. What's your favorite thing? I love all the illustrations in I'm preparing for this. I did research on some of those early illustrations and learn about all the allegories. And I hadn't realized that before. So I kinda want to go back through and see if there any others that I can research. There's buildings and here there's an animal of a walrus that I didn't have time to show. That's one of my favorites at a very full page, fold out poppy of the Renaissance Theater and stay called ls boreal. And it's just gorgeous. And I've only really looked at these three volumes. We have six more that I haven't even opened, so I wish I had time to dig through them and learn about all the illustrations. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, Jim. Thank you Alison, for a great program today. A virtual round of applause. I know you can't hear us, but we're all clapping on the other end of our computers. And I'd like to invite everyone here today to attend future Georgia Tech Library public programming. I've put the link to our library events, but you can also just Google Georgia Tech Library events and see what workshops and programs are putting on for the community. Though. Thank you again for attending today.