Martin Waldseemüller (about 1472/75 Wolfenweiler nearby Freiburg / Breisgau - Saint-Dié 1520/22)

Martin Waldseemüller, the famous cartographer and member of the circle of scholars in Saint-Dié (Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Lorraine, France), is well known especially as author of the large world map which he made together with Matthias Ringmann (1482–1511). This world map is known as the first one to use the name "America" and was originally published in April 1507. About 1000 items were printed, but only one survived till today. It can be seen at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

In the same year Waldseemüller also produced a globular world map, i.e. printed globe gores, designed to be cut out and pasted onto spheres to form globes of the Earth. In 1511 he started to create a wall map of Europe, the „Carta Itineraria Europea“ which was published in 1520. In 1516 he published a second large world map, the „Carta Marina Navigatoria“.

From 1505 Waldseemüller worked on a revised edition of Ptolemy's Geography with 27 maps and on 20 supplement maps, which show the newest kowings of Geography of that time. The maps were even accomplished in 1507, but the text was not ready. In 1508 Jacob Essler and Georg Ubelin took over editing the maps under the aegis of Martin Waldseemüller, which was printed and published by Johann Schott (1477-1548) in Strasbourg in 1513. This Strasbourg Ptolemy edition is regarded as the most important of Ptolemy's Geograpies ever and the supplement can be generally seen as the first modern atlas (see: John Goss, The mapmaker's art, 1993).

A second edition of Waldseemüller's  „Geographia“ was published in 1520, edited by Georg Übler, printed and published by Johann Schott in Strasbourg again. For this second edition the same woodblocks were used, just the map of Switzerland was replaced by a new one.

Today the woodcut maps of Ptolemy's Strasbourg edition by Waldseemüller are very rare and much sought after by map collectors from all over the world.