Windows on the world

The desire to chart the world around us is an impulse as old as time and some map-makers' efforts have an astonishing longevity, reveals Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

IN 1676, London publishers Thomas Bassett and Richard Chiswell had a success on their hands. Half a century after first publication, they reissued in a single volume two atlases by John Speed: The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine of 1612 and A Prospect of the Most Famous  Parts of the World (1627). Speed’s maps were of surpassing beauty, ornamented with decorative strapwork and flowing calligraphy by Dutch engraver Jodocus Hondius, their broad margins featuring medallion-shaped, bird’s-eye views of large and small towns, from Edinburgh to Radnor, or images of key buildings, including palaces and cathedrals, coats of arms of noblemen and university colleges and distinctive, flattened-perspective town plans. In his foreword, Speed had been at pains to assure his readers of the thoroughness of his research, so extensive, he claimed, that he had had ‘small regard to the bewitching pleasures and vain enticements of this wicked world’. His readers were convinced. Speed’s Theatre would remain in print until the final quarter of the 18th century and, on his death in 1629, Speed’s success as a cartographer accounted for healthy bequests to all of his 18 children who survived him.