Brouckner, Isaac

[Key sheets to the Nouvel Atlas de Marine] Carte Generale du Globe Terrestre… Basel: chez Jean Jaques Schorndorff, 1755, 2 sheets (500 x 392mm.), first sheet with engraved key map, explanatory letterpress below in French and German, second sheet with letterpress table of principal places

Phillips, Atlases, 4146; Shirley, British Library, M.BROU-1a

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate
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THE FIRST PRUSSIAN MARINE ATLAS, COMPLETE WITH THE RARE SEPARATELY-PRINTED KEY SHEET. The atlas forms a twelve-sheet wall map of the world. There is no separate title-page, the title being taken from the third sheet of the map.

The work is rare: Phillips refers to a 1912 facsimile edition, prepared by Dr M. Groll in which Groll states that “only three copies of the original atlas are known… to be in existence”. Those copies were located in the Library of Congress, the Nordenskiold Library at Helsingfors, and in the library of the Grand Duke at Weimar. Two additional copies have appeared in the market in the past 25 years. OCLC records only one institutional example; that in the University of Bern, Switzerland.

In addition to its rarity, this little-known wall map of the world is of great importance for mid-eighteenth century cartography. It was prepared under the auspices of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and the general direction of Field Marshall Count Samuel von Schmettau by the Swiss geographer Isaac Brouckner, who served as geographer to Louis XV. (Brouckner also had made a globe for the Empress of Russia in 1735). Phillips notes that Count von Schmettau, “who did so much in Prussia to raise the level of the scientific undertakings, not only theoretical but practical, of the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences during the eighteenth century… placed at Brouckner’s disposal all the sheets and memoirs that were available” in the Academy’s archives, “which were dealt with in a masterly way by the geographer, with the result that a most creditable marine atlas for the time was prepared, which certainly deserves to be designated as the first Prussian marine atlas”.