A historical map of Malta dating back to 1565 takes pride of prominence in a keepsake entitled The Great Siege of Malta 1565, that has just been published by Marianne de Vere Hinckle and printed at the Año Nuevo Island Press in San Francisco, California.
The publi-cation was presented on the occasion of the joint meeting of the Roxburghe and Zamorano Clubs held in Pasadena.
The Roxburghe Club is an exclusive bibliophilic and publishing society based in the UK. The Club’s foundation owes its origin to the sale of the enormous library of the Duke of Roxburghe (who had died in 1804), which took place over 46 days in May-July 1812. The auction was eagerly followed by bibliophiles, the high point being the sale on June 17, 1812 of a first edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, printed by Christopher Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, and sold to the Marquis of Blandford for about €2,767, the highest price ever paid for a book at that time.
The Zamorano Club is Southern California’s oldest organisation of bibliophiles and manuscript collectors. Founded in 1928, it sponsors lectures and publications on book-related topics. The provenance of the maps which appear in the keepsake come from the collection of Glen McLaughlin, who has a fine collection of Malta maps that were acquired over the years because of his interest in the Knights of St John.
The map which has been given prominence in the keepsake is a 1565 LaFreri map: Melita Insula Diui Pauli Apostoli, from the Glen McLaughlin collection. When Joseph Schirò, Secretary of the Malta Map Society, was asked to provide a description of the map, he could not but quote from the opus magnum written by Albert Ganado and Maurice Agius-Vadal A Study in depth of 143 Maps representing the Great Siege of Malta of 1565, Malta, 1994-1995. The broadside is also decorated with vignettes from maps by Johann Baptist Homann, Pieter van der Aa and Nicolas De Fer.
This keepsake is a way of celebrating relations between Malta and California. In October 2011, the International Map Collectors Society held their annual symposium in Valletta.
Marianne de Vere Hinkle, among other members of the California Map Society, attended and viewed the island and its treasures for the first time. She also saw the Albert Ganado Map Collection and his large Melitensia collection at his residence. This keepsake celebrates historians and collectors an ocean and continent apart, and the friendships that developed after the symposium.
The Malta Map Society is a very active society which promotes the love of maps of not only locally but also internationally. It has just inaugurated an exhibition on the cartographic output of the Brocktorff family who came from Schleswig-Holstein, at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta.
The exhibition, which is free to the public, will remain open every day until next Sunday. A very exhaustive catalogue raisonné has been published with the exhibition.