I had the pleasure of attending a very cool press event here in
our little town of Victoria, B.C on Vancouver Island! Our
awesome museum, The Royal B.C. Museum, has just scored a really
cool exhibition (“Envisioning The World: The First Printed Maps,
1472-1700″) open to all visitors of the facility. On loan from
Sonoma California, The Envisioning Our World exhibition brings
us some of the earliest known printed maps in the World! The
collection, ranging from 1472-1700 in period, is an impressive
display of 30 maps that made us sit back and say “Wow”. The
exhibition includes the first world map ever printed and a
simple woodprint from around 150 A.D. Perhaps the coolest map in
my mind was the Puetinger Table map (seen below) , perhaps the
world’s first road map, redrawn from a Roman 5th Century map
used by the Emperor’s couriers. It was also interesting hearing
directly from the Museum’s History Curator as well as the
collection owner who has come with the maps from California – I
had to chuckle at the referen