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Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons. The art of the decorative cartographic titlepage

Rodney Shirley

  • ISBN: 978 90 6194 060 9
  • Year: 2009
  • Size: 29,5 x 24,5 cm
  • Binding: Clothbound with full colour dust jacket
  • Illustration: Richly illustrated with many of the title pages presented full page and full colour
  • Pages: 272 pp

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This book aims to preserve and bring forward for wider appreciation the outstanding works of art that many engraved titlepages and frontispieces represent.
Over the time period covered by the present publication – roughly from the 1470s to the 1870s – very many printed books opened with an attractive decorative titlepage or frontispiece; sometimes both. In this book a limited selection has been made from the extremely wide field of known titlepages, mainly by a focus on subject matter which is primarily cartography, geography, history and topography, together with associated disciplines such as astronomy, travel and exploration. A selection of 100 main and approx. 70 supplementary entries adequately covers specimens of different styles, formats, and national characteristics over a four-hundred year time period from the late 15th century onwards. The choice of decorative titlepages or frontispieces includes examples emanating from Italy, Germany (including Switzerland and Austria), the Netherlands (including Flanders), France, Spain, England and some later examples published in the United States.


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Reviews

“Rodney Shirley, esteemed author of the standard reference work on early printed world maps, has written another scholarly book on a curiously neglected subject. (…) This book is superbly designed and produced with the very high quality of which the publishers are known. The highly informative text and descriptions are set opposite each beautifully reproduced title page. Shirley has astutely assembled his own collection of title pages over some time, and those in the book have been culled from other fine collections and institutions as well. Many of them are from the two great sales at Sotheby’s in 2005 and 2006, of the atlases in the library of Lord Wardington, a source of the very best examples possible.”
Source: Dorothy Raphaely in The Portolan (Issue 76, Winter 2009)
“Apart from providing an abbreviated publication history of the works these titlepages illustrate, Shirley decodes the allegoric imagery and mythological allusions in comprehensible terms, avoiding unnecessary verbosity of classical erudition. The result is a well-balanced combination of entertaining text with most attractive illustrations.
Source: Wulf Bodenstein in BIMCC Newsletter 34, May 2009
“The superbly reproduced titlepages continue to delight and inform. Shirley’s book will add value, in terms of deeper understanding and greater enjoyment, to the maps in your collection.”
Source: Peter Barber in IMCoS 118, Autumn 2009