Extremely rare atlas discovered in Norway thanks to Reddit

Thanks to a map-lovers on an online community, Norwegian reference librarian Anders Kvernberg has uncovered a copy of a very rare atlas.

National Library of Norway, Oslo. Image by Teresa Grau Ros / CC BY-SA 2.0

Published in Istanbul in 1803, the work had lain hidden in the National Library of Norway in Oslo until Kvernberg posted some scanned pages to a thread on the website Reddit. Fellow cartography enthusiasts on the thread realised the pages were from the Cedid Atlas Tercümesi, which is considered to be the first atlas ever published in the Muslim world. Only 50 copies of the work were printed, and, until now, only 14 of these were thought to remain. It’s thought that the atlas was acquired by the library in the 1950s. Read more: thelocal.no