With funding from the Rare Book Division, the Friends of the Library, and the Historic Maps Collection, in March 2009, the Library acquired a copy of the Philippe Vandermaelen, Atlas universel de géographie physique, politique, statistique et minéralogique . . . (Brussels, 1827), consisting of approximately 380 folio foldout sheets of maps and 40 pages of statistical tables. This is the first atlas to have been printed using lithography; it is also the first to show the whole world in maps using a uniform scale (about 26 miles to the inch).

The atlas was digitally photographed at high resolution in 2010, and is now available in two forms: in the Princeton University Digital Library [link] and on a stand-alone website, which includes a video showing a virtual rotating globe constructed from the Vandermaelen continental maps: the world as it was mapped in 1827 [link].