| Main centres: | 1-3 business days |
| Regional areas: | 3-4 business days |
| Remote areas: | 3-5 business days |
Published by Folio Society, London, 1991, slipcase, index, 116 pages, 26.7 cms x 36 cms, condition: as new.
A selection of maps that Gibbon will have drawn on when writing his works, with respective modern versions. Intro and commentary Felipe Fernandez-Armesto; modern maps and index gazetteer by Andrew Heritage and P J M Geelan.
Gibbon loved maps and lived at a time when mapmaking was being transformed by a technical revolution. So rapid and far-reaching were the changes in progress in his day that in spite of his efforts to keep up with the latest advances in cartography, Gibbon was compelled to rely, in writing the Decline and Fall, on maps that were already out-of-date. Much of the great mental canvas of the old world, on which he depicted the movements of armies, people and trade, was painted onto backgrounds mapped in the early or mid-eighteenth century or even, in some cases, in the seventeenth. Some of the best maps in his own library were not acquired until the late 1780s, when his History was already complete, or nearly so . The most far-reaching changes in scientific cartography in his day came too late to influence the maps available to him. Yet in his unremitting efforts to make sense of the bewildering peregrinations of the people he wrote about in ill-chronicled journeys over little-known terrain he probably became as well informed as almost any scholar of his age on the geography of the Eurasian landmass and northern Africa.
