Being a 19th Century freak, I am fascinated by pop-culture-art of the Three Penny Paper, or the Penny Dreadful.

In stark opposition to the serious tones of fine art of the 1800’s illustrated papers reflected the satirical side of Victorian culture; cynical, darkly humorous and critical of society. Punch, or The London Charivari as it was also known was definitely the most popular. Started in London in 1841 this weekly paper became an icon of British pop culture, the beak-nosed Punch character was taken from the medieval puppet show Punch & Judy,  and was read by the likes of Queen Victoria herself.

Ato Demeke Berhane shows and discusses Ethiopian manuscripts in Ge'ez, pointing out aspects of their binding, wooden board covers, cloth backings, cloth cotton covers to protect illuminations, and changing numbers, on a fifteenth-century manuscript. He also discuses the use of color in the particular manuscript, pointing out that all the persons--Jesus, saints, the Virgin Mary--are black.

The map or chart of Juan de la Cosa is a manuscript map painted on a 93 x 183 cm parchment and signed by its author in 1500 in El Puerto de Santa María (now in the province of Cádiz, Spain). It was rediscovered in Paris in 1832, and is currently preserved at the Museo Naval of Madrid.

This article will be of interest to all those who use Rodney Shirley's book, The Mapping of the World[1] for reference. He uses the word 'new' in the title of this article guardedly, meaning only that these six maps, among a number of others that have come to light, are not listed in the book (1984) nor in the addenda (1987). The author comments on the six maps in chronological order.

As part of the author's current project collating all pre-1800 atlases in the British Library he has studied the contents of more than sixty-five atlases by Seller, the Thorntons, and the successor firm of Mount & Page. Although Seller's maritime atlas publishing venture ended in failure he deserves perhaps more recognition than he has been accorded as a pioneer in this field.

Abraham Ortelius' Monumental work Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is regarded as the first atlas to appear. An atlas is defined in this instance as a uniform collection of map sheets of similar size, with sustaining text, compiled for the purpose of binding the sheets together to form a coherent book.

by Michael Kimaid

This article is a comparative study of how the Ohio territory and the nation of Liberia were mapped and settled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Despite the great distance separating the two, both were perceived of similar minds: early Americans who believed that their interests could be realized through a conscious manipulation of geography and the people who previously inhabited the land they coveted. Ultimately, both Ohio and Liberia are demonstrative of early conceptions of state and nation that would eventually give rise to the territorial empires of the nineteenth century. Prior to the development of geographical systems that accounted for land at the expense of the people who lived there, empires existed as centers and peripheries of power. By replacing the vague borderlands that had allowed indigenous people a degree of self-determination in their exchanges with an imperial presence with defined and precise borderlands, processes of removal and ultimately subjugation were made possible on a scale that increased the power and wealth of those who drew the maps at the expense of those who had previously laid claim to it.

by George Tolias

This special issue of e-Perimetron attempts a first evaluation of Greek map production in print during the Age of Enlightenment (1665-1820), a hitherto unexplored area of both Enlightenment cartography and the history of Greek printing. The issue is divided into two parts : the first is a short, interpretative effort to trace the history of Greek cartographic output in print, to evaluate its resources and functions, and to shed light on matters of its production and diffusion; the second part contains an elementary cartobibliography of 121 maps printed in Greek during the Age of Enlightenment, in a provisory checklist, open to additions and emendations.

by Evangelos Livieratos

In this short note it is put in evidence for the first time some important differences which exist in apparently two versions of Rigas Velestinlis Charta, the known major 12-sheet map of Greek Enlightenment published in Vienna in 1797.

by Maria Pazarli

The late eighteenth century twelve-sheet map, known as “Rigas Charta”, designed and produced by Rigas Velestinlis, a reference personality of the Greek Enlightenment, apart of its general cartographic value, its symbolisms and its placement in the historical context of the preliminaries, it is further characterized by an impressive representation of a huge number of coins placed all over the map surface. These coins with origin in the ancient and medieval periods are fundamental as a major “thematic” cartographic content of this map, the importance of which is discussed in this paper.