Laurens van der Hem

The Amsterdam lawyer and collector Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678) used his eleven volume Atlas Maior (1662) as a portmanteau for other cartographical and topographical prints and drawings. He augmented the 600 maps of his Atlas Maior with maps, drawings, manuscripts and printed texts of his own choice. Among the additions were four volumes of manuscript maps made for the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which normally were only for use by VOC officers.
In 1730, the atlas was sold by Van der Hem’s heirs to Prince Eugene of Savoy, stadholder-general of the Southern Netherlands. His heir and niece, Victoria, sold the atlas to the imperial library in Vienna, which is now the Austrian National Library. Besides the fact that the atlas still exists today (contrary to many known cases of collector’s copies), it is even more unique because the additional material not only has printed maps, but original drawings, and period colouring and gilding throughout the complete atlas.