Antique Chart of the World, Tea, Sugar, Coffee and Cotton Regions, 1870

About this sheet

A sheet of natural history charts of the world. It carries a zoological chart shewing the distribution of some of the principal members of the animal kingdom, a chart shewing the distribution of the principal plants, a chart shewing the distribution of the principal birds, and two vertical sections demonstrating how animals and plants succeed one another with altitude, from the temperate fauna at the foot to the snow line. The fifth panel, and the one most likely to catch a buyer, is a chart showing the regions of cultivation of the tea, sugar, coffee and cotton plants, a map of the commodities on which the Victorian economy turned. Small engraved animals sit on the oceans and continents: reindeer, whale, seal, bear, penguin. A cheerful and unusually decorative piece of thematic cartography.

Black's General Atlas of the World was the standard British household atlas of the middle nineteenth century, issued in Edinburgh by the publishing house of Adam and Charles Black, the firm better known to most readers as the publisher of Sir Walter Scott and of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Its maps were engraved on steel, most of them under the direction of the Edinburgh cartographer John Bartholomew, whose clear lettering and restrained hill shading gave the atlas a legibility that its heavier rivals lacked. Successive issues were revised as boundaries moved and railways spread, so a sheet from Black's records the world as an educated Victorian reader understood it in the year the plate was printed.

Sheets from this atlas are sought after today both as reference cartography and as decorative material, the generous folio format suiting a wall quite as readily as a portfolio. Hung as a pair or a group, the plates make a handsome and genuinely informative wall.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and a few small chips along the lower left edge of the margin; the charts themselves are clean.

This is an original antique map, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed. Any framed or interior images are shown for presentation and inspiration only, unless the listing explicitly states that the item is sold framed.