The earliest obtainable map to name America, as noted by Philip Burden (The Mapping of America, p.xxv, plate XII), a truncated cordiform projection, after Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 wall map. The title translates as "Delineation of the entire world prepared according to the teaching of Ptolemy the cosmographer, and the voyages of Americus Vespuccius and others by Peter Apian of Leissig." Published in the Viennese edition of Caius Julius Solinus' Polyhistor. Peter Bienewitz, known as Apianus, is considered a true renaissance man: astronomer, mathematician, cartographer, and printer. His "Introduction to Cosmography" (1524), a classic of the age of exploration, was the first geographical work of importance in which the experiences of the discovery of the new world were used. The foundation for Apianus’s success was this world map, published when he was just twenty-five. The Apianus map is based upon Ptolemaic traditions, but it is enhanced with information from the great early voyages of discovery by Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. By 1520 Apianus had gathered information from the most advanced maps yet produced in Europe, including the 1507 Martin Waldseemuller wall map (subsequently lost for almost 400 years) and perhaps the globes of Johan Schoner (ca. 1515). Apianus collected cartographical knowledge and refined these maps to produce a cordiform (heart-shaped) world map with the land mass of the New World labeled America. This map later appeared in various forms in Apianus’s famous and widely-circulated published works. Thus, for almost four hundred years, this 1520 world map was known as the source of the cartographic term “America” coined after the great explorer Amerigo Vespucci. In addition to the dramatic popularization of the term America, the map is significant as one of a handful of maps and gores from this early period to present the American continents as separate from Asia. In gauging the significance of this map, it is interesting to note that in an appendix to Ptolemy’s Atlas with additions by Waldseemuller in 1513, although the land mass of the Americas is represented, the term America was not used. Soon, however, Apianus was to popularize the term America in the present map and then in his influential Cosmographies. The history of the exploration of the New World and its mapping are inextricably entwined. Columbus’s voyages in the 1490s are the beginning and they are reflected in this map in its printed note, “Anno 1497 hec terra cum adiacetibo insulis inuenta est per Columbum Ianuensem ex mandato Regis Castello.” The voyages and the explorations of Amerigo Vespucci are forever glorified by Apianus by the adoption his name for the Americas. Very little documentation of the earliest navigational charts and maps of American exploration survives. No manuscript or printed maps or charts of the New World which can be dated accurately from before 1500 have survived, and no printed maps of the New World before 1506-7 are known. The few existing representations of the New World which have survived from before 1520 are rare relics. The list of these surviving relics recognizing the naming of “America” is very short. In 1901 a single example of a 1507 wall map by Waldseemuller was rediscovered in a European library and was recently purchased by the Library of Congress for $10,000,000. Two maps by Cornelius Aurelius, perhaps from 1514, and a handful of globe gores by two early makers exist in institutions as well. These singular, unobtainable examples were lost to scholars and the public for centuries, unlike the great 1520 Apianus map which forever established America as the identity of the New World. Church 45. Sabin 86390; Shirley 45; Harrisse, The Discovery of North America 126; Harrisse, Bibliotheca Americana Vetustissima 108.