A beautiful miniature Halma edition of a Sanson gentleman's pocket atlas in exquisite full contemporary Dutch color.

The volume includes Sanson's pocket atlas, with Bion's useful work on globes. Although this atlas is always listed under Nicolas Sanson, it is essentially Francois Halma's plagiarized pocket version of the Sanson atlas, with the map divided into continent groups. Halma (1653-1722) also reprinted Mercator's Ptolemy and Bonfrere's Geography for the growing French market.

The engraved allegorical title-page has caused some confusion among catalogers in the past, as it includes the date "1760". In all likelihood, this is an inversion of 1706 or some similar error, as Halma was dead by 1722. Neither the coloring nor anything else about the book suggests that it was published after 1720.

Provenance

• Baltazar Ciecierski (born 1680), court official of Drohiczyn, in Poland (inscribed on first dedication leaf “Ex biblioteca M. Balthasaris Ciecierskei [...]”);
• Jean R. Perrette, famed atlas and travel book collector. His sale, Christie's New York, 2016