Item #809 A Catalogue of the Maps and Charts in the Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard College.
A Catalogue of the Maps and Charts in the Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“The present Catalogue is intended to complete the Third Volume of the General Catalogue of Harvard College Library.”

A Catalogue of the Maps and Charts in the Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Cambridge: E. W. Metcalf and Company, 1831. Item #809

8vo.  245 x 145 mm., [9 ½ x 6 inches].  viii, 224 pp.  Original boards, cloth spine; cloth on spine chipped with some loss, remnants of paper label; a few pages heavily foxed, otherwise light foxing throughout.  This copy with the pencil signature of Calvin Stowe and the date 1832.  A good, sound copy.


This cartographic collection was formed by the German historian C. D. Ebeling of Hamburg, Germany.  He was a professor of Greek but was keenly interested in the history of the Americas and built a collection of over 10,000 maps and 4,000 books on the subject.  He published a five-volume set entitled, History of North America that was published in Hamburg between 1796 and 1816.  He was elected a Foreign Member of the American Antiquarian Society before his death in 1817.  After his death, Ebeling’s library and maps collection was purchased by Israel Thorndike, a Boston merchant, and given to Harvard College, making it the largest repository of cartography in America at this date.


The contents of the collection include Celestial and Terrestrial Globes, and World and Local Maps of all the European Countries, the British Isles, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, North and South America and its Adjacent Islands.  It also includes maps of Ancient Geography, and Nautical Charts.  The descriptions are printed in a short-title format, including place of printing, the printer, and in some cases the engraver.


Calvin Stowe was a professor of Greek at Dartmouth and later, founder of the College of Teachers in Cincinnati and advocate for the development of the common school system in America.


For Ebeling see Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography II, p. 296 and the American Antiquarian Society, List of Members; for Stowe, see Appleton’s . . . Biography, V. p. 713.

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Price: $300.00