# Waldseemuller's Globe Gores > Martin Waldseemuller - After 1507, most likely before 1513; a distinct, previously unrecorded edition, not the original 1507 printing > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/martin-waldseemuller/waldseemuller-1507-globe-gores/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-30 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Martin Waldseemuller - **Date:** After 1507, most likely before 1513; a distinct, previously unrecorded edition, not the original 1507 printing - **Medium:** Woodcut with letterpress text on a single sheet of paper, printed as twelve tapering gores meant to be cut out and pasted onto a sphere - **Dimensions:** Sheet approximately 18 x 35 cm, printed across two conjoined leaves; the twelve gores form a globe of about 11 cm in diameter when cut out and assembled. Other genuine surviving sets, pulled from different woodblocks, vary slightly in scale and finish. - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** German and Lorraine, early sixteenth century - **Current location:** Universitatsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich (LMU Munich University Library), Rare Books and Manuscripts Department - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary 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. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **after 1507-before 1513** Martin Waldseemuller's circle at Saint-Die, printed probably in or near Strasbourg `[documented]` (origin) The typeface used for the Diameter Globi line matches type used elsewhere by Waldseemuller's workshop, and the watermark and the cartographic content (a revised Madagascar following a nautical chart, and a shifted position for Calicut) date the printing after the 1507 first edition and before 1513, when Waldseemuller's next map dropped the name America entirely. No printer's name or place of printing survives on the sheet itself; the attribution to Waldseemuller's circle rests on typography and content, not a colophon. - **unknown** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) Nothing is recorded about who owned the sheet, or where, between its printing and its appearance bound into a library volume. How and when it was sewn between two editions of Johannes Peckham's Perspectiva communis is not documented. - **first half of the 19th century-1826** A bound volume containing two editions of Johannes Peckham's Perspectiva communis, with the gores inserted between them `[documented]` (binding and institutional transfer) The volume that now carries the shelfmark Cim. 107 passed out of the Benedictine monastery of Oberalteich in Bavaria at the secularisation of the Bavarian monasteries around 1803, into the library of the University of Landshut. The university, and its library, moved to Munich in 1826. Whether the loose gore sheet was already part of the Oberalteich monastery's holdings before 1803, or was bound in afterward at Landshut or Munich, is not established in the sources consulted. - **1826-1955** University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich `[documented]` (held, unrecognised) The volume was held among the library's rare books, unidentified, through more than a century that included evacuation and relocation of the collection during and after the Second World War, documented at the library as a 1942 to 1955 wartime dispersal and return. The globe gores travelled with the volume through this period without being noticed for what they were. - **2012-present** University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich `[documented]` (rediscovery and authentication) Found during cataloguing work in the spring of 2012 by the library's own staff; the librarian credited with the find is Elke Humml. Sven Kuttner, the library's rare book specialist, identified the cartographic and typographic differences from the four previously known sets. Library director Klaus-Rainer Brintzinger announced the find publicly on 3 July 2012, calling it a sensation. The library has held it, catalogued and digitised, since. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **** , - This specific sheet has never been offered at auction; it was found in a library's own holdings, not bought. A different set of Waldseemuller's globe gores was offered at Christie's, London, on 8 June 2005, estimated at EUR 690,000 to 1,000,000 as lot 97 in a sale of the Charles Frodsham and Co. collection. That sheet, and the Bavarian State Library's own long-held set, were subsequently shown by ink and pigment analysis to be twentieth-century forgeries pulled from a shared fake printing template. Those figures and that market history belong to a different, discredited object, not to the Munich sheet described in this record. ## Open questions - When did this particular sheet enter the binding it now sits in, and was it already part of the Oberalteich monastery's collection before the 1803 secularisation, or added later at Landshut or in Munich? No source consulted establishes this. - Who printed this edition of the gores, and where exactly? Typeface and watermark point to Waldseemuller's circle and the Alsace region, but no printer's name or place of printing survives on the sheet. - How many genuine sets of Waldseemuller's globe gores survive today? This record counts three (Minnesota, Offenburg, Munich) after excluding two now discredited sheets, but this archive's own record for the 1507 wall map cites a higher figure that appears to date from before the 2018 forgery confirmation and may also conflate Johann Schoner's separate globe gores with Waldseemuller's. - Was this sheet, or either of the other two genuine surviving sets, ever cut out and pasted onto a sphere? No assembled globe made from any surviving printed sheet is known to exist. - Does the Wikimedia Commons file credited to the Badische Landesbibliothek and used for comparison in this record in fact depict the Offenburg exemplar? The file's own description page does not name the holding institution directly, and this record has not independently confirmed the identification. - What was Waldseemuller's exact reasoning for revising Madagascar's outline on this edition while apparently leaving other geography from the earlier gores largely unchanged? The change is documented; the workshop's decision-making behind it is not. ## Sources - [1] Chet Van Duzer, 'Details, Date, and Significance of the Fifth Set of Waldseemuller's Globe Gores Recently Discovered in the Munich University Library' (2012). - [2] Irmela von der Osten, 'Cim. 107-2 (= 2 Math. 499#2): Globussegmentkarte von Martin Waldseemuller nach 1507,' prepared for the Munich Historikertag 2021, Universitatsbibliothek der LMU Munchen. - [3] Universitatsbibliothek der LMU Munchen, digitised catalogue record for '[Globensegmente],' Cim. 107#2, urn:nbn:de:bvb:19-epub-13138-6. - [4] science.ORF.at, 'Wertvolle Waldseemueller-Karte entdeckt' (3 July 2012). - [5] Medievalists.net, '500 year old map of America discovered in Munich' (2012). - [6] International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB), '500 year old Waldseemuller map found at the Munich University Library.' - [7] Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, press statement, 'Bavarian State Library confirms that its own Waldseemueller globe gores map is a forgery,' Munich. - [8] Stadtanzeiger Ortenau, 'Christie's stoppt Auktion historischer Weltkarte: Die Eine-Million-Euro-Karte,' on the 2005 Christie's lot and its later exposure as a forgery. - [9] Stadtanzeiger Ortenau, on the Offenburg exemplar of the globe gores, found in 1993 by the librarian Vera Sack sewn into an edition of Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea printed at Freiburg in 1541. - [10] James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, 'At the Bell,' on the Bell Library's set of the gores and its provenance through the princely House of Liechtenstein. - [11] Library of Congress, 'Schoner Sammelband,' Exploring the Early Americas exhibition, and the Library's catalogue entries for Johann Schoner's own celestial and terrestrial globe gores of 1515 and 1517 in the Jay I. Kislak Collection. Automated fetch of loc.gov is blocked by a Cloudflare bot-check; content confirmed through search-engine caching and secondary citation, not read directly by this desk. - [12] Wikimedia Commons, file information for 'Waldseemuller Globensegmente Cim107-2.jpg,' source Universitatsbibliothek Munchen. - [13] Wikimedia Commons, file information for 'Waldseemuller-Globus.jpg,' source Badische Landesbibliothek. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.