(Right) Curator John Delaney, holding front cover, remarks on the Atlas to colleagues associated with the Near Eastern Studies Program: James Weinberger, Michael Cook, Sükrü Hanioglu, Michael Laffan, Svat Soucek. [Photograph courtesy of William Blair] (Above) Title page of the Atlas. [Call number: Historic Maps, item 5745136] (Below) Detail of east coast in the map of North America.

Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections announces the acquisition of a rare Ottoman imprint, Cedid Atlas Tercümesi (New Atlas Translation). Printed in Istanbul in 1803 in an edition of just fifty copies, the Atlas is the first Muslim-published world atlas based upon European geographic knowledge and cartographic methods. The Library of Congress reports just seven extant copies in Istanbul, and it appears that there are only three others in the U.S.: Library of Congress [see LC’s announcement], the Newberry Library, and the John Carter Brown Library [see JCB’s note(item 30)]. These are the only known complete copies outside of Turkey.

The Atlas is based upon the General Atlas of the Four Grand Quarters of the World of William Faden, a copy of which was acquired by Mahmud Raif Efendi when he was a private secretary at the Ottoman embassy in London. While still in London, Mahmud Raif Efendi wrote a geographic work, İcalet (or Ucalet) ül-Coğrafya, in French. This 80-page geographical study was translated into Turkish, printed in 1804, and bound with the Cedid Atlas Tercümesi. This modernizing bureaucrat is also the author of Tableau des Nouveaux Reglemens de l’Empire Ottoman, a work describing military reforms undertaken in the empire. Princeton also owns a copy of this important work.

The purchase of Cedid Atlas Tercümesi was made possible by funds from two sources: the Rare Books Division and the Friends of the Princeton University Library. For more information, contact John Delaney (delaney@princeton.edu), curator of Historic Maps.