Abraham Ortelius’s Library Reconstructed

Abstract

It is well known that during his lifetime Ortelius gradually filled his house with substantial collections of various forms of art. He also accumulated a large library of printed books, books with maps, loose maps, portolan charts, manuscript maps and manuscript texts. The aim in this article is to arrive at an estimate of the size of his library at the time of his death in 1598. The focus is on his maps and books, information for which comes primarily from Ortelius himself. Unusually for the time, Ortelius recorded his cartographical sources and the books and authors he consulted for his maps and writings in a Catalogus auctorum, but much can also be discovered from the texts on the verso of the maps in the Theatrum orbis terrarum, and from the Synonymia and Thesauri, his correspondence and the ledgers in the Plantin Moretus Museum, in which Ortelius’s transactions with Christophe Plantin were recorded. Some of Ortelius’s library books, identified by his signature, have survived. From all these sources it is estimated that Ortelius owned about 5,965 maps and 3,514 books written by about 2,892 authors, making his library one of the largest, if not the largest, private collection of books and maps in sixteenth-century Europe.