Mapmaker and publisher
Joan Blaeu
The Amsterdam publisher of the Atlas Maior, the grandest atlas of its age.
On Picturepops™ cards · 1
The life
about 1596–1673
Joan Blaeu trained as a lawyer, then joined his father Willem’s map business in Amsterdam, took it over with his brother Cornelis in 1638, and followed his father as mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company. His Atlas Maior of the 1660s, in eleven volumes with some 600 maps, was one of the grandest books of the century, and in 1649 he published town books of the Netherlands full of bird’s-eye plans. Our card, Leiden Corn Exchange and Town Hall Tower, opens onto his 1649 map of the city.