Dear Reader,

Some months ago I paid a visit to Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library, and asked him to show me some of their treasures with a view to reproducing one as a facsimile. Treasures they were indeed – exquisite autograph maps by the great Mercator himself, magnificent atlases commissioned by the Medici in Florence, and many other masterpieces. ‘And there is one more I’d like to show you,’ said Peter, ‘which is very special indeed – The Queen Mary Atlas.’

He opened a vast leather bound volume and there, in glorious colours on ancient vellum, was a map of Western Europe. The sea was peppered with noble galleons and writhing leviathans, the land ornamented with exquisite cities and sumptuous coats of arms. Yet there was a curious blemish to this beautiful object – the coat of arms depicted across the heart of England had been neatly defaced, so that the left-hand side was quite indecipherable. ‘That was the work of Queen Elizabeth,’ said Peter, enjoying my evident bewilderment, ‘only the Queen herself could have done it. Originally, those were the conjoint arms of England and Spain.’ Then he explained the whole story behind the atlas: how it had been commissioned by Queen Mary from Diogo Homem, the finest cartographer in the world, as a gift to her beloved husband Philip II of Spain; how on Mary’s early death the atlas had passed to her sister Elizabeth; how Elizabeth in turn had courted Philip but been rebutted; how in a fit of rage she had defaced the Spanish arms. ‘Of course some of this is speculative,’ Peter concluded, ‘but the internal evidence is pretty conclusive.’.

As befitted the gift from his queen to the mightiest man of the age, the atlas was indeed a superlative creation, larger in format and more elaborate in decoration than any other atlas of that era; and there is no finer era in the history of cartography. It was less than a century since Columbus’s rediscovery of America and less than forty years since the first circumnavigation of the world. Mapping had moved in giant strides since the schematic representations in medieval times, yet vast tracts of the globe remained unexplored. Thus, while much in The Queen Mary Atlas is easily recognizable today, certain areas are wildly speculative: the mythical Great Southern Continent is depicted, and there is much uncertainty (to say the least!) about the western seaboard of North America.

Producing a facsimile of this stupendous atlas posed unusual problems. An early decision was that it should be bound following the style of the original, with each individual map mounted on a guard which is then recessed into the spine of the book: as a result, the maps open flat, and thus every detail can be comfortably studied. The binding case with its rendition of the conjoined arms of England and Spain makes handsome amends to Mary for the damage wrought by her sister, and reminds us of the story behind this great atlas.

By no means the least of our challenges has been to represent The Queen Mary Atlas in a brochure. Those of us who have been involved in the project know that it is only when one has had the chance to turn the gigantic pages and to study each of the maps in detail that one can appreciate fully its artistic and historical value. We can only hope that we have managed to convey something of its magnificence.

Yours sincerely

Joe Whitlock Blundell
Production Director

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