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COURTIERS AND CANNIBALS, ANGELS AND AMAZONS: THE ART OF THE DECORATIVE CARTOGRAPHIC TITLEPAGE
Shirley, Rodney
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This book aims to preserve and bring forward for wider appreciation the outstanding works of art that many engraved title pages 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 title page or frontispiece, sometimes both. In this book, a limited selection has been made from the wide field of known title pages, focusing primarily on cartography, geography, history, and topography, together with associated disciplines such as astronomy, travel, and exploration. A selection of 100 main and approximately 70 supplementary entries adequately covers specimens of different styles, formats, and national characteristics over a four-hundred-year period from the late fifteenth century onwards. The choice of decorative title pages and frontispieces includes examples emanating from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands (including Flanders), France, Spain, England, and some later examples published in the United States. Richly illustrated, with many of the title pages presented full page and in full color.
Rodney Shirley was educated at Stowe and at the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. His main carrer has been in business but for many years he has been a collector and historian of early maps and associated decorative titlepages. He is past president and a current council member of the International Map Collectors' Society. His book The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700 is a standard reference work, as are his two other books on the early maps of the British Isles. More recently, in 2004, he published a detailed descriptive work Maps in the Atlases of The British Library c.850AD-1800. Shirley lives in Buckingham and is married with three grown-up children.
Available outside North America from HES & DE GRAAF Publishers.
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