Emilius Bærentzen & Co., creators. Plan af Kjöbenhavn = Plan of Copenhagen. 1853. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.
The Geography and Map Reading Room holds over one million maps, atlases, and other cartographic materials. In addition to the more than one thousand maps of Denmark represented in the online catalog, the Geography and Map Reading Room also has an uncatalogued collection of about one thousand items, Maps of Denmark from approximately 1658 to 1970. The following overview of the Danish collections served in the Geography and Map Reading Room will only suggest some of the high points to be found. For starters, the Library has several atlases with reproductions of the earliest map of Scandinavia, drawn by Danish mapmaker Claudius Clavus in 1427.
Incidentally, what is perhaps the most remarkable item related to Denmark in the Geography and Map Reading Room is a Spanish translation from the Latin: Joan Blaeu’s Atlas mayor . . . (1659–1673). This atlas is generally considered to be the most beautiful illuminated cartographic work ever published, and this particular edition is exceedingly rare, as Blaeu’s publishing house burned down in a fire in 1672, destroying most of the copies in the print run. Within a section on Scandinavia, volume 1 displays a map of the Danish island of Hven, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe founded his observatory Uraniborg. In addition to illustrations of the castle and its grounds, the volume also includes a number of detailed and colorful images of Brahe’s astronomical instruments. Joan Blaeu was the son of Willem Blaeu, who had been Brahe's student between 1594 and 1596.
Published in Amsterdam in 1659, Frederik de Wit’s Perfeckte Kaerte van’t Coninckryck Denemarcken [Complete map of the kingdom of Denmark] captures what had been the border with Sweden before the First Carl Gustav War (1657–1658), in which the dual monarchy of Denmark-Norway lost the provinces of Blekinge, Halland, and Scania.
Tome 5 of Erich Pontoppidan’s Den danske Atlas eller Konge-Riget Dannemark . . . [The Danish atlas or the kingdom of Denmark] (1763–1769) is held by the Geography and Map Reading Room. For the complete run of tome 1 through tome 6, please visit the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, or request the facsimile edition from the general collections.
One can also search specifically for digitized maps.
The Geography and Map Division (G&M) has custody of the largest and most comprehensive cartographic collection in the world with collections numbering over 5.5 million maps, 100,000 atlases, 8,000 reference works, over 5000 globes and globe gores, 3,000 raised relief models, over 130,000 microfiche/film, and a large number of cartographic materials in other formats.
