Ortelius and the first modern atlas
Abraham Ortelius was born in Antwerp in 1527 and began his working life colouring maps for the city's booksellers. He went on to trade in maps, books and antiquities, travelled to fairs across Europe and built up contacts among the people who made maps. In 1570 he published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, usually described as the first modern atlas.
Collections of maps already existed. Bound sets of Italian maps made to order were common in the sixteenth century, and Ptolemy's Geography had been printed with maps for decades. What Ortelius did was different. He chose maps by many authors, redrew them to a single size and style, engraved them on copperplates and printed a descriptive text on the back of each sheet. A buyer got a volume that was uniform, portable and available off the shelf.
A book that grew
The first edition held around fifty maps. Ortelius kept revising it, adding sheets and correcting old ones, and later editions passed a hundred. The atlas appeared in Latin and in several vernacular languages, including Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian and English.
Crediting sources
One feature that set the Theatrum apart was a list of the authors whose maps he had used, the Catalogus Auctorum, printed with the atlas and extended in later editions. Ortelius corresponded with mapmakers and credited them as a matter of course. The list is still a useful guide to who was making maps in Europe at the time.
Ortelius and Mercator
Ortelius knew Gerardus Mercator, and the two exchanged information. Mercator's own collection of maps appeared only after his death, in 1595, published by his son Rumold. Mercator took the name Atlas from a legendary king of Mauretania, whom he described as a scholar of the heavens, rather than from the Titan who held up the sky. The Theatrum was the first atlas in the modern sense, and Mercator's book supplied the word.