Decorative Engraved Title of Moll's Classical Atlas.

Moll, Herman. "Geographia Classica, Thirty two new and accurate maps of the geography of the ancients as contained in the Greek and Latin classicks." "Geographia Classica. emmendata ex Græcorum Latinorumq, Authoribus Antiquis, ubi Tabellis XXXII. Veterum Locorum Apellationes Geographiæ recentissimæ et Accuratissimæ summa cum diligentia Accommandantur; Doctissimo Viro WILHELMO STUKELEY M.D. Collegii Medicorum Londinensium et Societatus Regiæ ibidem Socio Humillime oblata ab" London Moll, Herman; Bowles, Thomas & John. c1726
Copper engraved decorative title page for Herman Moll's "Geographia Classica".Black & white; verso blank.
The decorative engraved frontispiece includes illustrations of the Collossos of Rhodes and Biblical and Roman history in the background with four Classical figures in the foreground, the females within a library and the Greek Philosophers on a grassy bank. Black and white; evenly toned; folded.

Herman Moll (1654-1732)

"came to London in about 1678 from Germany or Holland and worked as an engraver for Moses Pitt, among others. He clearly had a talent for making interesting friends and provided maps for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. He also knew explorer/buccaneer William Dampier and the chemist Robert Boyle. From 1689, he had his own London shop. Maps of a uniquely Moll character began to appear during Queen Anne's reign, and his individual style of mapmaking grew increasingly more distinct as his career progressed. Herman Moll, was one of the most significant and distinctive European cartographers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He enjoyed a lengthy and productive career that spanned almost six decades and yielded more than two dozen geographies, atlases, and histories, as well as myriad separate maps, charts and globes spanning the known world. Although generally not held in high regard for the originality or content of his cartography, he possessed a strong and tasteful design sense that, when combined with his engraving talents, led to the creation of unique and aesthetically pleasing maps, some of which must be considered graphic masterpieces. Moll and his maps also flourished during the fascinating and dynamic era of the British Enlightenment and the early, heady days of empire. The cartographer eventually became part of a number of impressive circles that gathered regularly at London coffeehouses and which included, among others, the scientist Robert Hooke, the writers Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Jonathan Swift (Gullivers Travels), the buccaneers William Dampier and Woodes Rogers, and the field archeologist and antiquarian Rev. Dr. William Stukeley. Over the years they and others came together in loosely knit and shifting groups and developed an intellectual and commercial interdependence around the themes of geography, cartography, literature and empire. Although he spent most of his working life in London, Moll probably was born in the once-great German Hanseatic city-state of Bremen in 1654 and likely came to London in the mid-1670s as a refugee from the turmoil of the Scanian Wars, during which Bremen was overrun. Moll probably learned his engraving skills in his native Bremen or elsewhere on the Continent before coming to England. He was part of an already well established North German movement to England and especially London that climaxed with the accession of King George I and the House of Hanover in 1714." --Dennis Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literari: "Herman Moll and His Intellectual Circle"
155 by 228mm (6 by 9 inches).   ref: 2393  €150