Mercator's 'Atlas' was meant to describe the whole universe, not just maps
When Gerardus Mercator put the word atlas on a book title in 1595, he meant a meditation on the creation and shape of the entire cosmos. He named it for a legendary king of Mauretania he considered the first great geographer. Within decades the word had shrunk to mean a bound collection of maps.
An atlas is a set of maps, usually of the whole Earth, a continent or a region, though astronomers also produce atlases of the sky and of other planets and their moons, and anatomists map the body's organs. Traditionally bound as books, many now come in digital formats, and alongside borders and landscapes they often carry statistics on politics, society, religion and economics.
Mercator's book, whose full Latin title speaks of cosmographical meditations on the making of the world, appeared in Duisburg a year after his death. Its title shows he intended a wide-ranging account of the universe, but later editions trimmed it down to maps, and by the middle of the 17th century that narrower sense had stuck. His tribute was to the Titan Atlas, in his telling a Mauretanian ruler and pioneer of geography.
The Italian Pietro Coppo assembled systematically arranged maps of uniform size in the early 16th century, but because his work went unpublished, the honour of first modern atlas usually goes to Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, printed in 1570. Early buyers rarely picked an atlas off the shelf ready-made. Sheets were stored separately, customers chose which maps they wanted and whether to have them coloured or gilded, and only then was the volume bound, so copies sharing a title page can differ inside. Joan Blaeu's Atlas Maior followed in the 1660s, the Klencke Atlas of 1660 ranks among the largest books ever made, and John Ogilby's Britannia of 1675 was the first printed at a fixed scale, one inch to the mile.
Governments started issuing national atlases in the 19th century, and long-running names such as Rand McNally from 1881, the Times Atlas from 1895, the Soviet Atlas Mira from 1937 and the National Geographic atlas from 1963 followed. Formats vary with purpose. In Europe, national atlases are usually drawn between 1:250,000 and 1:500,000, while city atlases sit around 1:20,000 to 1:25,000; the London A–Z uses 1:22,000 overall and doubles to 1:11,000 for the centre. Travel atlases often have spiral bindings to lie flat, while desk atlases resemble reference books.
Source: Atlas
