As a librarian, I know the helpless feeling of having someone asking for a book by its name and author, and still not finding it anywhere. In by far the most cases the lender remembers the title slightly (or completely) wrong, and this is what we politely try to tell them. But of course, once in a while the catalog itself is wrong or incomplete. It's not supposed to happen but, just like anything that's not supposed to happen, from time to time it does. And that makes us look very inept and somewhat stupid, especially after we've politely encouraged the lender to think just a little harder. In such cases, we correct the catalog and hope for it to be the last time.
I am of course also a book colletor on my spare time. I specialise in maps and atlases, and I do keep them all organised in a catalog, listing the basic bibliographic data. Not that I need to, because I know exactly where each one is at any given time. It's not so much about finding the books, as it's about discovering more about them. Because finding out when and where each book is from is not always as easy as it sounds.
Sometimes they don't print the printing year. Maybe they just expected people to throw the map away and buy a new one after New Year's. So now, decades later, I must resort to carefully checking the ever-changing borders and place-names. Russian Alaska, Austro-Hungary, East Germany and so on. In most cases, it can be pinpointed down to a three or four year period. The greatest challenge still is extracting the publisher's name and so on from foreign script books like Arabic and Chinese. But with the help of transcription tables, foreign friends and international library databases these exotic riddles are normally solved in the end. (Obsolete languages are a bit harder. I'm still working‒or rather looking for help‒on pre-war Japanese and Ottoman Turkish title pages that I'm not sure today's native speakers could easily read.) But the most difficult one this far was, believe it or not, a 19th century German world atlas.
German isn't some obscure language from ages ago, it's practically the same as my native tongue Norwegian. Compared to Chinese it is, anyway. Also (no surprise!) Germany is, from a professional cataloger's point of view, heaven on Earth. In fact, I use a German search engine, the Karlsruhe catalog, to access British, American and other library inventories. It has such a neat, streamlined interface, and everything is there, exactly in its right place. That's why I was so surprised when I tried to look up my latest acquisition.
I picked up this marvellous old atlas in a Swiss second-hand-everything-store. (It was either this book, a Moon globe or a genuine Napoleon style hat, and every night I pray that I won't be faced with such a heart-breaking dilemma ever again.) The title is clear enough, the author as well. It's called
Professor Daniel Völter's Hand-Atlas der Erd-, Völker- und Staatenkunde.
Vierte, vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage.
(Professor Daniel Völter's Hand Atlas of Geography, Ethnography and Nations
Fourth, expanded and improved edition.)
It's printed by Verlag von Conrad Weychardt in Esslingen am Neckar. There is no printing year, but each map page is dated with its latest revision. These range from 1853 to 1863. Among the latest is the map of the US, which was at the time a rapidly changing nation at war with itself. The book is beautifully printed, very fine-lined for its time, with 38 magnificent hand-coloured maps of continents, nations and various aspects of the known world. But it didn't seem to be registered anywhere. I was especially curious to find out exactly when it was published, what with the varying dates on each page.
I considered the possibility that the maps were printed individually and issued to subscribers, as was often the case with larger works at this time. But a ten year period seemed like a bit of a strech, and the book has a beautiful original printer's binding, not the private binding that is so typical of these "partial" issues. It really seemed like it was published collected as one piece, in or later than 1863.
After searching absolutely every catalog I could think of, I found only two entries for this title: The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek had a 1855 edition and the Universitätsbibliothek Bern had a fifth edition dated 1867. The 1855 edition was listed in several German publishing lists of the time, but I found none later than 1860. That is exceptionally few surviving copies, and clearly mine was none of these.
On the commercial market, all I found was a British antiquarian bookseller offering one page from one of the editions: The East Asia map. There was no information about what book it came from.
I also found a few other books by professor Völter, he had published a historical atlas in the 1850s and a school atlas in several editions. But a fourth edition Hand-Atlas from later than 1855 was mysteriously missing from all lists.
However, I found something else helpful through all my efforts: Jürgen Esperhort's book Petermann's Planet seems to be the authoritative work on the subject and it contains a bibliography of German Hand-Atlases from 1800 to 1950, including the Völter publications. I lent the book from Germany through the National Library, and after waiting a few weeks I could finally look up professor Völter to find a sizeable piece about his life and career. (He was born in 1814 and actually a priest-turned-scientist.) The book also contained a meticulous list of his geographical publications. The list appears to be assembled from library catalogs, and there seems to be no list kept by Völter or his publishers.
Esperhorst's bibliography lists a 4th edition of the Hand-Atlas published 1855 (apparently, there are four known copies worldwide‒It's hard to believe) and a 5th edition printed in 1867. According to Esperhorst, no copies of this fifth edition could be located. (Although the University Library of Bern lists one in their catalog, I haven't checked if it's physically there.) And finally: No mention whatsoever of a revised fourth edition published between these two. Or to be precise‒in 1863.
So, it appears I am the owner of a hitherto unknown, undocumented book. I tried contacting Mister Esperhorst, who requests updates, but the email address given in his book was defunct. So what do I do? I post the full story here, hoping that some day somebody else will be frantically googling the old professor Völter (often spelled Voelter), and the revised fourth edition will in the end make its way into a bibliography somewhere.
And to back it up and spread the word, I'll include the full atlas in PDF format here (I'm sorry the resolution isn't better, but I don't have a wide selection of A0 scanners).
Please enjoy this old treasure‒It's one of a kind.
