A large proportion of County Maps were published in series, where the series would typically be an atlas. This area of the website contains a collection of gallery pages for these county maps series with cartobibliographical details.
My definition of a series is a collection of maps printed from the same series of plates, together with all later editions based upon those plates. Many series contain examples of every county. However, there are also shorter series where intended county atlases were never completed, or replacement plates were created for later editions of atlases where some of the original plates didn't survive. It's these shorter series that contribute to the diversity, making each county's cartographic history unique. Some of the earliest incomplete sets had a profound influence on the maps that followed. For example, William Smith and John Norden made maps of just a small number of counties, and it was these that were copied by later cartographers in preference to those of Saxton.
My objective is to describe all these series, in chronological order. This is, however, a time consuming task. Hence these pages are very much a work in progress. I will be adding pages in chronological order but many will initially contain only minimal information, which will be added to over time.
I don't believe that the subject of county maps has been covered in this way before. There are excellent and highly detailed county cartobibliographies, for counties such as Warwickshire, Hertfordshire and Sussex. There are also detailed accounts of county atlases, but these are concerned with atlases rather than series. The best general work which deals with the subject, to a comparable level of detail, is Yasha Beresiner's book on English County Maps, but this is organised alphabetically rather than chronologically. |