Introduction
About This Exhibition
Since Out of This World was first mounted in 1995 and made available on the Internet, we have continued to acquire celestial atlases whenever opportunities arose. In the past ten years we have added about thirty rare books that are either star atlases per se, or volumes that contain charts of the heavens or figures of the constellations. From these, we have selected fifteen of the most important, or the most attractive, to display, as we remount Out of This World. We call this supplemental exhibition, Further Out.
The two most significant additions are Christoph Grienberger’s Catalogus veteres (1612), and Johann Bode’s Vorstellung der Gestirne (1782). The Grienberger volume is one of the scarcest of all celestial atlases, with just five surviving copies known in the entire world. It was the first important atlas published after Johann Bayer’s Uranometria (1603), which was the featured atlas in Out of This World. The Bode atlas of 1782 was the first of what one might call the “German Flamsteeds” – atlases based on the French edition of John Flamsteed’s Atlas celeste (first published in Paris in 1776), but with German constellation names. Our Flamsteed collection is now complete, as is our collection of Bode atlases.
As important as these two atlases are, the viewer might be more attracted to two other atlases, because of their visual appeal. One is Alexander Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822), which stands out because of its beautiful coloring; the other is the tiny Himmels-Atlas by C. G. Riedig (1849), which uses an unusual blue-tinting technique to produce some charming little plates. This is one of the nice features of celestial atlases – they are historically of great importance in documenting changes in our knowledge of the heavens, and they are aesthetically of great interest because of the beauty of their imagery. There are eleven other atlases on display, each of them a significant addition to our collection. It is a pleasure to exhibit them here.