Maps & Atlases, Natural History & Color Plate Books

Swann Auction Galleries Sale #2760: A promising winter sale of maps and historical artwork ranges from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, and includes travel accounts of the New World, including a first edition of John Ogilby’s 1671 description of America complete with 18 maps and over 30 engraved views of the Western Hemisphere and Laurent Fries’s Tabula Terrae Novae from 1541.

Several strong nineteenth-century maps that tell the story of Texas history will be on offer, including the E.H. Ross Western Map Emporium’s county and railroad map of the state from 1873. A rare small pamphlet by Samuel Olmstead encouraging gold prospectors and settlers into transcontinental railroad passage to “The new El Dorado of the West,” with contemporary accounts of mining success in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, is a true highlight. Birds, bugs, the world’s smallest printed map, and early ice supply to New York City are some other fun things to be on the lookout for.