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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 7655515, member: 110350&quot;]I know it&#039;s been true since at least the late 1960s, when I was in my early teens and started buying old maps and prints from the dollar bins at the Argosy Book Store on 59th Street, that the vast majority of old maps and prints on the market (whether for a dollar or a thousand dollars, and up) were cut from old atlases and other books. (You can often tell from a page number in the corner, or the presence of text on the reverse.) And I&#039;m sure that was the common practice long before then. It may be a crime from a book-lover&#039;s viewpoint, but it makes perfect economic sense. I own a number of maps printed in the 1500s, but only one of them was intended as a &quot;stand-alone&quot; map. The rest are quite small -- so-called &quot;miniature maps&quot; -- and clearly come from 16th century atlases. A complete atlas from that era would be far beyond my means, whereas individual maps are surprisingly affordable given their age. One of my oldest maps is this &quot;city view&quot; map of Freiburg im Breisgau (now in Baden-Württemberg) printed in 1549. It cost a few hundred dollars, but that&#039;s a far cry from what the entire atlas from which it came would have cost. (I was interested in it because my maternal grandmother and her family lived in villages in the vicinity of Freiburg for hundreds of years until 1940, some of them in Freiburg itself after the 400-year ban on Jews residing there or being there after dark was lifted in the 1860s.)</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1316130[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Separately, I am in awe of [USER=90666]@Andrew McCabe[/USER]&#039;s collection. Out of all those books he shows in this thread, the only one I have -- and my only book about numismatics from before 1800 -- is Pinkerton, from 1784:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1316121[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Unfortunately, it doesn&#039;t have many illustrations. Its main interest for me is the appendix at the back with a quite detailed price guide for Roman coins then available on the market, which I find fascinating. I&#039;ve posted pages from it in the past.</p><p><br /></p><p>I do have quite a few numismatic books from the 19th century, from as early as 1820, but all of them are about British coins and historical medals except for my copy of Hill&#039;s Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins, from the late 1890s. Which hardly counts as &quot;old&quot; in the context of books, so I won&#039;t bother posting a photo![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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