The paper atlases cannot be dragged around. What makes them so irresistible?

Who would have thought that with the arrival of the smartphone – in which almost the entire world can be searched down to street level – the atlas in book form would die, was wrong; the atlas is blooming like never before. The atlas as a source of topographical information is still being sold, alongside its digital competitors, but in addition, a market for thematic and historical atlases has emerged over the past ten or fifteen years. Three publishers dominate the market: Noordhoff Atlas Productions, WBooks and Thoth.

Noordhoff’s evergreen is The Great Forest Atlas, of which the 56th edition since 1877 appeared in March, formally and in practice still a school atlas, but also suitable for the enthusiast. There is also a digital version, so that the atlas can also be consulted on mobile.

Noordhoff has been publishing a series of spin-offs from the GBfrom The Bosatlas of Cultural Heritage to the pinnacle of informative atlases, The Bosatlas of the history of the Netherlands, from 2011. The godfather of the thematic genre, Peter Vroege, recently retired and now makes Bosatlas puzzle books for fun. But his successors are undoubtedly already busy with new projects that combine cartography and information provision. The possibilities are endless, and the enriched atlases are popular with buyers, they regularly end up in the top 60 of the CPNB.

Historical atlases are also hard to come by. Not so long ago, one sometimes appeared left and right, but until 2005 the genre was mainly limited to the Great Historical Atlases (of, for example, the Achterhoek, Liemers and Rijk van Nijmegen), reprints of the topographical military maps from the middle of the the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Undiscovered Treasures

Furthermore, facsimile editions of old atlases appeared regularly. For example, in 2012, Lannoo published a wonderful edition of the Atlas de Wit from 1698, with numerous large format maps of Dutch and Flemish cities. After that it got tough. Historians delved into the archives in search of undiscovered treasures. They turned out to be in abundance.

Publisher Thoth released the City atlas Jacob van Deventer from, a beautiful pavement tile with 226 city plans from the period 1545-1575. In addition, Thoth published a series of historical (city) atlases, the most recent of which is that of Amsterdam.

New at Thoth: the extensive The Netherlands at its best – The eighteenth-century Republic in map and image, which is based on the 23-part Present State of the United Netherlands, a historical-topographical description of the Republic and The Glorified Netherlands (nine parts) by the Amsterdam publisher Isaak Tirion (1705-1765). For the first time, all the visual and cartographic material from Tirion’s ambitious publications are brought together in a single overview – supplemented with maps from the collection of the Allard Pierson in Amsterdam.

The Netherlands at its best is a picture book and an atlas, containing, in addition to dozens of colored maps and city plans, no fewer than 959 images (etchings) of churches, monasteries, town halls and other buildings in Dutch villages and cities, by well-known draftsmen such as Cornelis Pronk, Jan de Beijer and Abraham de haen.

They show a Netherlands that is sometimes still recognizable, but which in most cases belongs to a disappeared – demolished, bombed away, burned down – past. That makes this historical atlas a monument, a Grand Tour through an idealized Netherlands that was too good to be true but nevertheless pleasant to look at.

Atlases with a story

Publisher WBooks put itself on the map in 2016 with the publication of Beckeringh’s atlas, the collected preliminary studies for the map of the province of Groningen made by Theodorus Beckeringh in 1781, with a facsimile of the original map.

The fourth Historical Atlas by compilers Martin Berendse and Paul Brood was recently published by WBooks. The two men keep up a solid pace: appeared in 2019 How the Netherlands has gathered itself together in 2020 The true scale of the Netherlands and in 2021 Netherlands urban country. The topic for 2022 is crime and punishment: Dutch over the line, a mixture of thematic and historical atlas. This represents a new trend, which in turn offers great opportunities.

The Atlas of the lost railway lines in the Netherlands from 2016, which is now in its sixth edition at WBooks, beautifully demonstrates the power of the historical thematic atlas: it tells a story. Anyone who has ever bent over a map (and who loves all those abstract lines and colors that together form a cohesive reality) knows the feeling: a new world opens up for you, like the maps with forgotten railway lines. It is no longer about the beautiful cards – or at least not just anymore – but about the story you can illustrate with them, that of a disappeared world that is suddenly brought back to life.

They are ‘narrative atlases’, which not only show how the Dutch have appreciated knowing where they lived and therefore mapped that area over the centuries, but also tell a broader story. At WBooks, four such narrative map books appeared in 2021 alone: ​​the Atlas van Twickel, about one of the largest estates in the Netherlands and its significance, the Atlas of the IJssel, about the most beautiful river in the country and its long history, the Historical Atlas of Zeeland – which beautifully shows how the sea has changed the land and how man got the sea under it – and the Historical Atlas of the Biesbosch, the story of six centuries of Biesbosch, another fascinating area.

Rich tradition

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the Netherlands was a cartographic power, with world-famous mapmakers such as Petrus Plancius, Johannes Blaeu, Johannes Janssonius and Frederick de Wit. The Atlas Major van Blaeu was the most famous book of the 17th century (and also the most beautiful and the most expensive, the simplest edition cost 250 guilders, an average annual salary). It is tempting to trace the Dutch love for the atlas back to that rich tradition, but that is difficult to prove.

Perhaps the maps gave the citizens of the tiny North Sea state a view of the larger world from their armchairs – and they still do. Which in turn does not explain why we have mainly and endlessly drawn our own piece of land on the maps.

Unlike those of the thematic atlas, the possibilities of the historical atlas are not endless, but are limited to the finite amount of maps in the Dutch archives and museums. Nevertheless, there are so many that we can move forward for the time being: the National Archives alone have a collection of 300 thousand maps and drawings and 400 atlases, map books and portfolios with maps.

Ron Guleij made a selection from that collection for WBooks under the title The Great Map Book, five centuries of cartography based on six themes: water, land, navigation, justice and borders, military and overseas. They were not chosen by chance. Since the Middle Ages, maps have played an important, if not crucial, role in each of these areas: establishing ownership relationships, mapping out militarily contested areas, organizing our security in the face of rising waters and navigation at sea: where do we get our goods come from and how do we get them home safely? With that, The Big Book of Cards a course in card use through the ages.

The chapter ‘Military’ – maps and defense form a unity – opens with ‘A cartographer in the Spanish service’, the Amsterdam map artist Joost Janszoon Beeldsnijder. In 1573, he made a map for the Duke of Alva with which the Spaniard could go on a campaign to North Holland and in particular Alkmaar. The siege of that city was unsuccessful, but that was not because of Beeldsnijder’s map; waterways, important for transport and supplies, were clearly marked on it.

Some of the best maps are in the ‘Ground’ chapter. The administration of land, especially its ownership, cannot be recorded without maps. Especially since the land registry was established in 1832, map production has been booming. The principle started much earlier: the Carthusian monastery near Delft had the land ownership around the monastery recorded as early as 1555. Beautiful is the ‘New Map of The Hague with the surrounding Villages and Country Estates’ by SW van der Noordaa from 1839, with the later drawn railway line The Hague-Rotterdam.

That The Hague is no longer there, but luckily we still have the cards.