Ptolemaeus, Claudius (c. 90-c. 168).

first edition of the most celebrated geographical text of antiquity and of western geographical knowledge. The translation is by Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia, and was made between 1406 and 1409; its circulation in the fifteenth century did much both directly and indirectly to create the modern world. (The Macclesfield Library also has a manuscript of the translation made in the fifteenth century.)

The Geographia (or Cosmographia) of Ptolemy is by the same celebrated mathematician of antiquity who gave us the mathematical picture of the universe which held sway until Copernicus. It is partly based on the work of one Marinus of Tyre (c. 100 AD), who is known only from Ptolemy’s mention of him, which itself is founded on many localised accounts of itineraries and voyages recorded in what the Greeks called periploi. Details of places and where they stand in relation to each other is, for example, a feature of much of Herodotus’s Histories, but the location details are incidental. Ptolemy’s work is much more accurate; he also seems to have been the first to locate places in terms of their longitude and latitude.

His text is in eight books, book I giving details for drawing a world map with two different projections (one with linear and the other with curved meridians), books II–VII being a list of some 8000 locations with longitude and latitude (with at the end of book VII instructions for a perspective representation of a globe), and book VIII breaking down the world map into twenty-six smaller areas and providing descriptions which might serve for cartographers. However, manuscripts of the work do not seem to have circulated with maps. A shadowy figure, an engineer of Alexandria and possibly a contemporary of Cosmas Indicopleustes and John Philoponus, one Agathodaimon, is said to have sketched the map of the oikoumene, or entire inhabited world, but we have no reason to believe that this map (or any others) formed part of the manuscript tradition, which is reflected in the unillustrated first edition.

the 1475 ptolemy is of great rarity. The only copy of this edition recorded in ABPC as having been sold at auction in the last 25 years is that in a Pillone binding sold in these rooms on 7 December 2000, lot 14, £480,000. There was no copy among the rich Ptolemy holdings of the celebrated Wardington collection sold in 2006.

The rebindings of this type, with the large embossed arms on the covers, were afforded to relatively few books in the library in the 1860s. One or two other examples may be seen in this sale, and others may be seen on books that were highly prized at that time, e.g. the Shirburn ballads, the two books printed by Caxton (bound in full green morocco), and certain scientific books.