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Ogilby, John.
Africa; Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of AEgypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid, the Land of Negroes, Guinee, Athiopia, and the Abyssines; with all the adjacent 2 - C - islands, either in the Mediterranean, Atlantick, Southern or Oriental Sea, belonging thereunto.
Publisher: Printd by Tho. Johnson, London;
Date of Publication: 1670
Stock Code: 14125
First Edition. Folio, pp., [16], 767, [1]. Complete with a fine large folding map of the continent of Africa, a further 12 double-page engraved maps (some folding), 31 double-page engraved plates and 46 in-text engravings. With the half-title that is often lacking. Later half-calf over marbled boards, titles and double-fillets in gilt to spine on six raised bands, all edges speckled red. Bookplates of Francis Fulford, Esq of Devon, dated 1699 and Morris J. Cohen, a South African artist and author, to front paste-down.

Shelf-wear to edges of boards, corners bumped and rubbed, joints a little worn. Minor water staining to lower margin of later gatherings, but a generally a very well-preserved copy. The first edition of the richest account of Africa written in English in the seventeenth century. John Ogilby was a dancing-master, poet, printer, geographer, and compiler of Atlases. This volume was to be the first in his atlases of the world, and firmly secured him a place in the firmament of great British geographers. Ogilby’s work was understood as a significant book within and shortly after his lifetime, this title appears in the first surviving visual depiction of a book auction, produced at the turn of the eighteenth century (see BM 1851,0308.20). A visually impressive and historically significant book, Ogilby’s Africa is one of the great English print projects of the late-seventeenth century.

£5000.00