Waldseemuller's Globe Gores

This is not the map. It is the other object the same Saint-Die workshop printed in 1507: a single sheet of twelve tapering woodcut gores, meant to be cut out with scissors and pasted around a small wooden or plaster ball to make a globe about the size of an orange. It is a separate physical artefact from both the great wall map now in the Library of Congress and the 1516 Carta Marina beside it, and it has its own, stranger story.

The copy described here is not even an example of the famous first printing. It surfaced by accident in 2012, when a librarian at the University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, cataloguing a nineteenth-century binding of two editions of a medieval optics textbook, found a set of globe gores sewn between them. Comparison against the four sets already known showed it was pulled from a completely different woodblock, with the island of Madagascar redrawn to match a more accurate chart and the port of Calicut moved to a different segment. The paper's watermark places the printing after 1507, probably before 1513. Munich had never seen this edition before, because nobody had known it existed.

The find also landed in the middle of a market failure. Of the four sets of gores known before 2012, one, at the Bavarian State Library across town, was confirmed in 2018 to be a twentieth-century forgery, and a second, offered at Christie's in 2005, was shown to have come from the same fake printing template. That leaves, by the best current count, three genuine surviving sets of Waldseemuller's globe gores anywhere: the University of Minnesota, the Historical Library at Offenburg, and this one, an edition nobody else has.

A globe you were meant to cut up

The object described in this record is not the famous wall map. It is a different, smaller, and much odder thing that came out of the same workshop in the same year: a single printed sheet showing twelve narrow, tapering wedges of the world, called gores, arranged so that a buyer could cut them out with scissors and paste them, edge to edge, around a small wooden or plaster ball. Glued down correctly, the twelve gores make a globe roughly the size of an orange, about 11 centimetres across. It is, so far as the surviving evidence shows, the earliest printed globe to carry the name America.

Almost nobody did this. Of the small number of genuine printed sheets that survive today, not one is known to have actually been cut up and assembled into a globe. Every surviving example, including the one this record is about, exists because it was kept flat, unused, and eventually forgotten in a library. The object's usual fate, being cut to pieces and pasted onto a sphere, is exactly the fate none of the survivors met. That is why there is anything left to look at.

Found in a book about optics, not about maps

The copy this record describes surfaced by chance in the spring of 2012. A librarian at the University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich, Elke Humml, was working through a routine cataloguing correction on a nineteenth-century bound volume when she found a folded sheet of globe gores sewn between two separate printed editions of Johannes Peckham's Perspectiva communis, a standard medieval textbook on optics that had nothing to do with cartography. The gores had been sitting there, misfiled by content and unread by anyone who understood what they were, for the better part of two centuries.

Sven Kuttner, the library's specialist in early printed books, compared the new find against the four sets of Waldseemuller's globe gores that were known to exist at the time. He found enough differences to call it, in his own words, unique. The library's director, Klaus-Rainer Brintzinger, announced the discovery publicly on 3 July 2012, describing it as a sensational find, and it drew international press coverage within days.

Not the 1507 edition: a separate woodblock

The Munich sheet is not a copy of the famous first printing. Chet Van Duzer, a historian of cartography who examined the find soon after it surfaced, established that it was cut from an entirely different woodblock than the one used for all four previously known sets. The evidence is both typographic and cartographic. On the other four sets, most of the gore segments carry a thick black border; on the Munich sheet they do not. The style used to render open water differs. The shapes of individual letters differ. And the paper's watermark, a letter P surmounted by a four-lobed flower ornament, matches watermarks documented in a book of 1518, which places the paper, and so the printing, later than 1507.

Two further, apparently deliberate changes confirm the later date. On the four previously known sets, the coastline of Cuba is only loosely drawn; on the Munich sheet it is more carefully articulated, closer to the shape Waldseemuller gave it on his large 1507 map. And the island of Madagascar, which on every other known set of the gores carries a distinctive L-shaped outline borrowed indirectly from the cartographer Henricus Martellus, has been redrawn on the Munich woodblock: the portion of the island north of the Tropic of Capricorn has been cut away and replaced with plain hatching for open water, moving the whole island south to match a different and more current source, the nautical chart of Nicolo de Caverio of about 1504.

Dating a sheet with no date on it

Nothing on the Munich sheet states when or where it was printed. The date has to be argued from the evidence, and the argument brackets it fairly tightly. The Madagascar revision and the watermark both indicate a printing after the first edition of 1507. The upper bound comes from the name America itself: it appears on the Munich gores, exactly as it does on the 1507 map and the other four known sets, but it disappears entirely from Waldseemuller's next cartographic project, the world map he prepared for the 1513 edition of Ptolemy's Geography, and it never reappears on his 1516 Carta Marina either. Since the Munich gores still carry the name, they must have been printed before that change of mind, which places them most likely before 1513, and certainly before 1516.

There is a smaller, harder puzzle inside that bracket. On all four previously known sets, the trading city of Calicut sits in the fifth gore segment, northeast of the island of Taprobana. On the Munich sheet it has moved to the fourth segment, northwest of Taprobana. Van Duzer noted that this position matches, more closely than any of the other known gores do, the position of Calicut on the terrestrial globe built by Johann Schoner in 1515, a globe that otherwise followed Waldseemuller's 1507 map closely. That is suggestive rather than conclusive. It raises the possibility that the Munich edition of the gores, not the wall map, is the source Schoner actually consulted for that one detail, but it does not prove it.

How this differs from the wall map's story

The 1507 wall map's fame rests on a single, unrepeatable fact: exactly one copy of the first edition survives, and it is the physical object on which the word America first appears in print. The globe gores are a genuinely different kind of survival problem. They were never unique. A thousand copies of the map, the gores, and the accompanying book were reportedly printed together at Saint-Die in 1507, and at least one further, separate edition of the gores, the Munich sheet, was produced afterward within the same workshop tradition. The gores were not one irreplaceable object under threat of loss; they were a mass-produced accessory, sold to help a buyer understand the projection used on the map and to let him build a working model of it at home.

That difference in kind produces a different kind of danger. Because the wall map is unique, nobody can plausibly manufacture a second one and pass it off as the original. Because the gores were printed in numbers, from more than one edition, and because so few genuine sets survive to compare against, they are exactly the kind of object a forger can imitate convincingly, and that is precisely what happened to two of the four sets that were known before the Munich sheet surfaced. The wall map's danger is loss. The gores' danger is substitution.

Three genuine sets, and a market that failed twice

Before 2012, four sets of Waldseemuller's globe gores were known to scholarship: one at the University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library, one at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, one at the Historical Library in Offenburg, and one that had passed through the London dealers Charles Frodsham and Co. and was offered at Christie's on 8 June 2005 as lot 97, estimated at EUR 690,000 to 1,000,000.

The market did not hold. Comparison of the Christie's lot against the Bavarian State Library's own long-held sheet found the two identical in every physical detail, which pointed to a shared printing template rather than two independent period impressions. The Bavarian State Library then examined its own sheet's ink under its Institute of Conservation and Restoration and found iron and titanium, almost certainly iron titanate, a pigment that was not manufactured before the first half of the twentieth century. The library confirmed in 2018 that its own long-accepted set was a modern forgery, made, it believes, by the same hand and process as the sheet offered at Christie's. The forged sheet had arrived at the library in 1990 bound into a genuine 1486 Ptolemy incunable with an impeccable seventeenth-century provenance; the fraud rode in on the book's real pedigree, not its own.

That leaves, on the best current count, three sets of Waldseemuller's globe gores whose authenticity is not in question: the University of Minnesota's, the Historical Library at Offenburg's, found in 1993 by the librarian Vera Sack sewn into a 1541 edition of Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea, and the one described in this record, the previously unrecorded edition held at the University Library in Munich. None of the three has ever been assembled into a physical globe.

From a Bavarian monastery to a Munich rare book room

The volume that carries the Munich gores, now catalogued as Cim. 107, is built around two separate printed editions of Johannes Peckham's Perspectiva communis, one from 1504 and one from about 1510, with the gore sheet inserted between them and the whole bound together sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. That binding volume descends from the library of the Benedictine monastery of Oberalteich in Bavaria, which was broken up at the secularisation of the Bavarian monasteries around 1803 and transferred into the library of the University of Landshut. The university and its library moved to Munich in 1826, and the volume has been part of the Munich university library's holdings ever since.

Whether the gore sheet was already part of the Oberalteich monastery's own collection before 1803, or was added to the binding afterward at Landshut or in Munich, is not established in the sources consulted for this record. What is documented is that the volume, wherever the gores joined it, survived the collection's evacuation and dispersal during the Second World War, a period the library itself records as running from 1942 to 1955, and came back into the university's rare book holdings intact. It sat there, uncatalogued as anything more than a bound optics textbook, until 2012.

What the discovery is not evidence of

It would be easy to read the Bavarian State Library's 2018 forgery confirmation and the Munich university library's 2012 discovery as parts of the same story, since both involve a Waldseemuller globe gore sheet in the city of Munich. They are not connected. The two objects are held by two different institutions, the Bavarian State Library and the university library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, which are separate organisations with separate collections. The university library's sheet was identified as a previously unrecorded genuine edition through typographic and watermark analysis in 2012, six years before the state library's sheet was shown to be a modern fake. The two findings do not corroborate or undermine each other; they simply happened, by coincidence of geography, in the same city.

It is also worth being precise about what does and does not belong to this object's own family. The Schoner Sammelband, the portfolio assembled by the Nuremberg globe maker Johann Schoner in 1517 that is now split between the Library of Congress and, formerly, the Waldburg-Wolfegg family, contained the unique 1507 wall map, the unique 1516 Carta Marina, and Durer's 1515 star chart. It also contained a set of globe gores, but the Library of Congress's own catalogue identifies those specifically as Johann Schoner's own celestial and terrestrial globe gores of 1515 and 1517, a different maker's work, not Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 design. A reader moving between this archive's record for the 1507 wall map and this one should not conclude that the Library of Congress holds a set of Waldseemuller's globe gores; on the evidence available, it does not.

What the gores add to the naming story

The Cosmographiae Introductio, the short book Waldseemuller and his collaborator Matthias Ringmann issued alongside the map and the gores in 1507, makes the naming argument explicit: since Europe and Asia were both named for women, the authors saw no reason not to name the fourth part of the world for Amerigo Vespucci, the man credited with recognising it as a separate continent, calling it Amerige, or America. The gores were sold as part of that same package, a three-piece release, map, gores, and book, aimed at anyone who wanted to understand and literally hold the new geography Vespucci's voyages had forced onto European cosmography.

The Munich sheet's evidence adds something the wall map's own record cannot: proof that Waldseemuller's workshop went back to the gores specifically, revised their geography against newer sources, and printed them again, still carrying the name America, at some point in the years between the 1507 map and the 1513 Ptolemy that dropped the name entirely. The gores, not the wall map, are the object that shows the naming decision still circulating and still being reprinted after 1507. That the name eventually stuck came from other people entirely, Johann Schoner in 1515 and Peter Apian in 1520 among them, who kept using it after Waldseemuller himself had moved on. But for the years immediately after 1507, before that adoption by others took hold, this edition of the gores is direct physical evidence that Waldseemuller's own circle had not yet abandoned the word.