The (Sun) King’s View of the World
Posted by: Neely Tucker
The personal world atlas of Louis XIV of France, the absolutist Sun King, was a doozy: a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. It was the first world map to show the mythical Sea of the West, a supposed inland sea in the Pacific Northwest, and was the first world map in more than a century to show California as a peninsula, not an island. The creator of the map, Jean-Baptiste Nolin, was later successfully sued for plagiarizing its greatest cartographic innovations, but Louis never let go of his copy.
Posted in: Geography and Maps Division, LCM, Maps, Technology