<b><i>The British Isles, Vol. 1: England. Guides to Dutch Atlas Maps.</i></b> Eds. Peter van der Krogt and Elger Heere. Houten, Netherlands: Hes & De Graaf; New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2012. 256p. alk. paper, $115 (ISBN 9781584563006). LC 2011-592008.

It is not self-evident to most of us that an atlas is not just a collection of maps bound together or left unbound in a portfolio. As the authors of the present work set forth emphatically on their very first page, an atlas " is a collection of printed maps in book form or bound similarly to a book with a printed title page. " Further, there must be " a rough uniformity of map format , design, and presentation throughout the work. " Why these picky distinctions? The reason is that an atlas is a coherent intellectual work as much as a novel or a scientific treatise is. Great atlases represent the successful effort of the human mind, represented here by the cartographer assisted by an engraver, to impose a uniformity of view on vastly disparate physical facts, making the geography, topography, and often demographics of, say, England comparable to those of the Netherlands or Germany. This book—and indeed the entire series of which this is the inaugural volume—is an introduction to the genre in its glory years, once intaglio methods in both wood and copper had become capable of rendering great detail in consistent quality, an advance that benefited the study of anatomy and botany as well as cartography and cosmography. Thus it is no coincidence that Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (1543) in Basel just a quarter century before Abraham Ortelius published the first atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), in Antwerp. The first can be described as a geography of the human body; the second no less accurately as an anatomy of the world. Therefore, much of what Sachiko Kusukawa writes in her recent Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (University of Chicago Press, 2012) applies equally to the significance and advances in cartography of the same period. Perhaps Abraham Ortelius's most important achievement was to gather all the disparate maps of his age, redrawing, reformatting, and re-engraving them, and then publishing them together— copyright did not exist, though contracts often did—listing all the map authors in a " Catalogus auctorum tabularum geographicarum. " As successive editions of the Theatrum were published, this list grew from the original 87 names (1570) to 183 in the posthumous edition of 1603. By generalizing so many different maps in this way, he linked them intellectually as well, achieving …