British Library to put very big royal atlas online

The British Library in London is a quarter of the way through a major project to re-catalogue, digitise and conserve a 50,000-strong map collection assembled by Britain’s famous collector-king, George III (1738-1820). Among the objects to be digitally photographed is the world’s second largest atlas, which measures a huge 1.8m by 2.3m. The Klencke Atlas, named after the Dutch sugar merchant Johannes Klencke, who presented it to Charles II in 1660, contains 41 large-scale maps made in the 1620s and 1630s, a period known as the Golden Age of Dutch cartography. The maps were intended to hang on the wall, but were bound into one giant book.