![]() Indeed, if you have a jot of imagination, merely gazing at a map transports you. Some people use the collection to plan their vacations. My students see that at the time Harvard was founded, scholars weren't sure what revolved around what." "It has in its margins depictions of competing theories of how the universe behaves-Ptolemaic, Tychonic, Copernican. "I show my students a celestial map some 350 years old," says Sadler. Wright, lecturer on navigation, who teach Astronomy 2: "Celestial Navigation," take their students to the collection to learn what early artifacts can tell about the development of navigation. Sadler, assistant professor of education, and F.W. ![]() The collection is used extensively for teaching and learning. How could they not when a single CD-ROM contains an up-to-date street map of every city and town in America? Now the staff is entering the digital arena. It was founded formally in 1818, but of course Harvard had been collecting maps from its beginning. The collection is the oldest in the United States and among the finest at any academic institution in the country. Here are 400,000 maps on paper, 6,000 atlases, 5,000 reference books. "The concept of spatial relatedness, which is of concern in mapping and which indeed is the reason for the very existence of cartography, is a quality without which it is difficult or impossible for the human mind to apprehend anything."įor that reason, writes John Noble Wilford in The Mapmakers, "the uses of maps in human communication continually increase and diversify, reflecting the range of interests, knowledge, and aspirations-of what can be or should be 'apprehended.'"Īpprehending proceeds apace at the Harvard Map Collection, housed in Pusey Library. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik in The Nature of Maps. "Anything that can be spatially conceived can be mapped- and probably has been," write Arthur H. In addition to rare atlases, the collection contains very many large-scale, current topographic maps showing detailed terrain and water features, major roads, power lines, schools, cemeteries, dams, campsites, mines, and even building outlines for areas throughout the world. The atlas went through 40 editions, persisting well into the seventeenth century. ![]() The map collection has that book, but the plate reproduced here is from the first colored edition, issued in 1581. Ortelius gathered 70 maps by different makers, maps he re-engraved at proper scale for his atlas. For more information, see the homepage of the map collection's websiteĪbove: A year after Gerhard Mercator released his famous projection, which translated a spherical Earth into a flat map, his friend and cartographic rival, Abraham Ortelius, published the first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Amsterdam, 1570).
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