Copper engraving, charming rear colouring, 80x110 mm. Pleasing miniature map taken from ‘Epitome du Theatre du monde’, a pocket edition of the ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’, the first modern atlas, including maps of all areas of the world. The ingenious intuition of Ortels, later Latinized into Ortelius, was precisely this: before that time cartographic production had been irregular, local in terms of production and the few atlases, the so-called ‘Lafrerian Atlases’, were made up on request, collecting only maps of certain areas. Ortelius brought together the heterogeneous cartographic production of the period in a single corpus, forming the basis for an enormously successful publishing venture, published between 1570 and 1612. Good specimen printed rather off-centre at the top of the sheet.