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Willton in Wiltshire by Pierre Van der Aa

£35.00 Approx $44.14, €40.84

Code: 50884



Author: van der Aa, Pierre

Publisher: La Delices de la Grande Bretagne et de L'Irlande

Date published: 1729

Copper engraving with later hand colouring. Goeree J, artist. Overall size in hinged off white fully conservation mount and back (so floating freely apart from two pieces of archival tape) with v groove decoration: 31.8cms x 29.8cms. Engraved size: 153mm x 122mm. Centre fold as published. Pieter Van Der Aa (1659-1733) was apprenticed to the booksellers' trade at nine. He later became a bookseller and auctioneer, and in 1692 was appointed one of the High Commissioners of the Booksellers' Guild. Van Der Aa was a prolific publisher, working in Leiden during the first three decades of the eighteenth century. Much of his output consisted of re-issues and re-engravings of map and view plates that he had acquired from earlier mapmakers. Little of his output was original, though that which is has a very distinct style and is much sought after to-day. Perhaps his most remarkable publication was the elaborate Galerie Agreable Du Monde, issued in 1729, in 66 parts, bound into 27 volumes, which contained about 3,000 plates, apparently limited to 100 sets. Another of his extensive publications was the Cartes Des Itineraires Et Voiages Modernes, a collection of 28 volumes of travel accounts, illustrated with a series of small, but finely engraved maps, often with decorative pictorial title-pieces. An interesting feature of Van Der Aa's method is that several of his atlases include maps printed within large, elaborately engraved mock-frame borders, which were prepared with a blank centre so that individual maps could be over-printed on that area. Van Der Aa's atlases seem to have had only a limited circulation, and so are now scarce.