SANSON, N. - Lot 54

SANSON, N. L'Asie / L'Afrique / En Plusieurs Cartes Nouvelles. ... / L'Europe dédiée à monseigneur le Tellier. Paris, l'Autheur, 1652-1656. - Three small in-4 volumes. Contemporary vellum. Worn bindings. Small illegible rectangular stamp on white leaves and some maps in lower right-hand corner. Significant loss of vellum on the first cover of Asia, wetness at the end of the volume in the lower part, illegible stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the map of Arabia. Africa: brown stains on the map of Barbarie, illegible stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the map, some marginal wetness in the text. Set of 3 of 4 first-edition volumes of Sanson's atlases covering Asia (17 maps), Africa (18 maps) and Europe (12 maps), with maps finely colored to the boundaries at the time. The maps are accompanied by sheets of explanatory text. The Asia atlas includes important maps of Japan and the Philippines, as well as a map of Arabia showing Bahrain spelled "Baharem". As Sanson was the first French cartographer to have access to the Jesuit surveys that had just arrived from China, his work provides previously unpublished information. The first atlases published by Sanson, a pioneer in atlas production and in making cartography a science, were in-4 atlases of the continents. Most of the maps were engraved especially for these works, and were not reductions of larger maps already published. He was the sole publisher of the in-quarto atlases of the four continents. These atlases were widely distributed thanks to foreign editions, which grouped the four works under the general title of "Description de tout l'univers". Pastoureau, Les atlas français XVIe-XVIIe siècles, Sanson III A.