Oceanique. Partie de la Nouvelle Holland…

Rare, large scale c.19th hand coloured lithographed map of Melville Islands, with a table of historical information at right from Vandermaelen’s monumental Atlas universel de geographie physique.

This was the first atlas produced using lithography, the first in which all the maps were on the same scale (1:1,641,836) and additionally, the maps were designed to be joined into a three-dimensional terrestrial globe with a diameter of approximately 7.75 meters. He built one example of this monumental globe that the maps were designed to create and it measured more than 7.01m in diameter.

From: Vandermaelen, Atlas universel de geographie physique, politique, statistique et mineralogique, sur l’echelle