Description

The atlas was lithographed by a Leipzig-based firm Wagner & Debes, specialized in chromolithographed maps and atlases. It was commercially known for their cooperation with Baedeker and for their Handatlas, a populistic atlas of the world with colourful plates. Although the firm was printing maps directly from stone plates, instead of using more modern techniques, what made the production time consuming and expensive, Wagner & Debes received several international orders in the early 20th century, related mostly to the maps from their Handatlas.

In the first three decades of the 20th century they cooperated on several grand projects, such as the printing of the general atlas in Saint Petersburg, an Czech atlas made for a Geographical society in Prague and an unfinished atlas in Hungarian language, but after the war Wagner & Debes mostly specialized in more profitable school atlases in various languages, such as Latvian, Spanish, Hebrew and the present school atlas in Ottoman language, which was made in 1922, for the newly founded Republic of Turkey (Jürgen Espenhorst, The History of Cartography, Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, Mark Monmonier (ed.), 2015, pp. 1690-1691).

The atlas, which was published by Karmi, an Istanbul-based book dealer of Jewish origins, centralizes on the new republicanism and opens with a map of the new Turkish capital Ankara above the maps of the Izmir Bay and the Dardanelles Strait, followed by maps of Turkey, Istanbul, Europe, continents, the world and a celestial map. The border, which remained unresolved until 1927, between Iraq and Turkey remains undefined.

The atlas was probably sold only through Karmi’s publishing house in Turkey for a short period of time and is rare in the western libraries. Worldcat only lists two institutional examples, housed at the Boğaziçi University Library and library of the Bamberg University.

References: OCLC 949536147, 632952950.