With fund­ing from the Rare Book Divi­sion, the Friends of the Library, and the His­toric Maps Col­lec­tion, in March 2009, the Library acquired a copy of the Philippe Van­der­mae­len, Atlas uni­versel de géo­gra­phie physique, poli­tique, sta­tis­tique et minéralogique … (Brus­sels, 1827), con­sist­ing of approx­i­mately 380 folio fold­out sheets of maps and 40 pages of sta­tis­ti­cal tables. This is the first atlas to have been printed using lith­o­g­ra­phy; it is also the first to show the whole world in maps using a uni­form scale (about 26 miles to the inch).

The atlas was dig­i­tally pho­tographed at high res­o­lu­tion in 2010, and is now avail­able in two forms: in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Dig­i­tal Library [link] and on a stand-alone web­site, which includes a video show­ing a vir­tual rotat­ing globe con­structed from the Van­der­mae­len con­ti­nen­tal maps: the world as it was mapped in 1827 [link].