Boston Rare MapsSpecializing in antique American maps & prints
Second recorded impression of this elaborate and lovely synthesis of Classical and Christian cosmography, engraved in late-Renaissance Rome by Nicolas van Aelst. Such geocentric cosmographical diagrams are of great antiquity; versions appear, among others, in the writings of Aristotle (385-322 B.C.) and the great Alexandrian geographer and astronomer Ptolemy (fl. ca. 150 B.C.). The Classical […]
An important, rare and very unusual map of North America and the Caribbean, extracted by Blaeu from his landmark West Indische Paskaert to meet a publishing deadline. The Insulae Americanae depicts eastern North America, much of Central America, part of Latin America, and the islands of the Caribbean. The brightly-painted arms of the Netherlands, England […]
![John Seller, A Chart of the Coast of AMERICA from New found Land to Cape Cod by Iohn Seller Hyrographer [sic] to the king. [London: John Seller, ca.1674]](https://bostonraremaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/BRM3678-Seller-Coast-of-North-America-1674_lowres-150x150.jpg)
Very scarce chart of the coasts of New England and the Canadian Maritimes from John Seller’s Atlas Maritimus, the best depiction of the region then available. Published in 1674, at a transitional moment in the history of the English colonies in North America. The chart depicts the coast from eastern Long Island round to Newfoundland […]
This important work provides crucial information on eastern New York and southern New England. The main chart depicts the coast from Rensselaer Hook in New Jersey to roughly the “elbow” of Cape Cod, with extensive soundings and notations of shoals and other hazards. Much detail is given for Long Island Sound, Narragansett Bay and the waters […]
![John Thornton, Rob[er]t Morden and Phillip Lea, A NEW MAP OF NEW ENGLAND NEW YORK NEW IARSEY PENSILVANIA MARYLAND AND VIRGINIA. London, ca. 1685.](https://bostonraremaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/brm0975-thornton-ne-ny-nj-pa-md-va-1685-150x150.jpg)
The rare first obtainable state of the finest general map of England’s American colonies to date. This most important map is one of the earliest to adopt Augustine Herrman’s cartography for Virginia and Maryland. To the North it includes one of the earliest depictions of the Pennsylvania colony (est. 1681), the first printed chart of […]
In 1638, the General Court of the Plymouth Colony granted a group of settlers the rights to a new town named Taunton, the validity of which grant was confirmed by Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit. In 1664 Massasoit’s son and successor Metacomet-more familiar to us as “King Philip”–confirmed that grant in writing, with his interpreter John Sassamon […]
Published around 1700, this Kriegs Spiel, or “The War Game,” is a scarce and attractive sheet of playing cards designed to educate young people in the elements of conducting a military campaign. The sheet comprises 53 engraved panels numbered sequentially. All but one is a playing card using the French suits, each bearing an illustration of a military maneuver or fortification […]
![Homann, Joh[annes] Baptista, Nova Anglia Septentrionali Americae… Nuremberg, [ca. 1716/ ca. 1730].](https://bostonraremaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/BRM3606-Homann-Nova-Anglia_lowres-scaled-e1595348375169-150x150.jpg)
A most decorative and geographically intriguing map of New England, issued by Nuremburg mapmaker Johann Baptist Homann in or around 1730. Propelled by economic hardship, religious persecution and repeated warfare, in the late 17th century waves of German settlers began the first of many waves of immigration to America. Through the end of the 18th […]
An extraordinarily rare, interesting and sumptuously decorated allegorical map of the Island of Felicity, produced for one of the first Masonic orders to admit women. Background The map was designed and printed for l’Ordre de la Félicité. This short-lived Order was a quasi-Masonic secret society established in France in the early 1740s by Louis-Joseph Scipio La […]
![PLAN OF CAPE BRETON. [London: Printed by C. Ackers in St. John’s Street, August, 1745].](https://bostonraremaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/BRM3254-Plan-of-Cape-Breton-1745-e1576363988875-150x150.jpg)
A scarce plan of the 1745 siege of the fortress of Louisbourg, published in the London Magazine for August of that year. Remarkable for having been issued less just a couple of months after the French surrender. Eighteenth-century North America was the scene of a global struggle for empire between France, Great Britain, Spain, and […]