The record behind the sheet in your tube: the file we worked from, what we measured, what we chose and why, what we are allowed to sell, and the framing dimensions for this sheet.
The sheet you have
- Work
- Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596–1665), Planisphaerium Ptolemaicum, sive machina orbium mundi ex hypothesi Ptolemaica in plano disposita, plate 1 of Harmonia macrocosmica, seu Atlas universalis et novus
- Object
- Copper-plate print, coloured by hand; Amsterdam, apud Joannem Janssonium, 1661. Plate 51.34 × 43.75 cm, on a folded folio leaf
- Held by
- Zentralbibliothek Zürich
- Shelfmark
- T 12 · doi 10.3931/e-rara-89076 · Koeman/Van der Krogt 1:801B, variant bc [Zürich III]
- File
- The library's own IIIF endpoint at e-rara, 10724 × 8204 px, taken directly from the institution and not from an aggregator
- Crop
- [1334, 442, 9419, 7331] → 8085 × 6889 px, the plate to its outer printed rule
- Printed at
- 50 × 50 cm sheet: image 42.00 × 35.79 cm, reduced 0.82× — 489 dpi available
70 × 70 cm sheet: image 51.34 × 43.75 cm, original size, 1:1 — 400 dpi available
Both files built at a flat 300 dpi, the most matte fine art paper resolves. Nothing enlarged in software. - Made in
- The certified house nearest your address, to one specification: 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks, same colour profile, same border geometry.
Where the centimetres come from
Old books are catalogued by the height of their binding, not by the size of the plate inside, so the catalogue could not give us a scale. The file could. Every JPEG the library's image service delivers carries a resolution of 400 dpi written into the file header, at every size it hands out — which means the figure describes the master scan rather than the copy. At 400 dpi the printed rule of this plate measures 51.34 × 43.75 cm.
Two checks on that. A text page of the same volume comes out at 30.6 × 49.9 cm, a folio page in a binding the catalogue gives as 52 cm. And a second copy of the same work, in the Städtisches Museum Schloss Rheydt, is catalogued at 51.1 × 43.1 cm measured to the plate mark. Hand-made paper moves by about one per cent from copy to copy, and the two measurements are the two different things they should be.
What we measured
The crop follows the outer printed rule of the plate — the copper-plate equivalent of the block edge on a Japanese sheet. Measured natively in fourteen bands along each edge, the rule wanders: 0.6 mm on the left, 1.8 on the right, 3.0 along the top, 1.3 along the bottom. That is the bound leaf bowing, not a rotation — the top edge rises across the width while the bottom edge falls, so no single angle would describe it and nothing has been straightened. The crop takes the outer envelope of those readings, so the rule is nowhere cut and a little paper comes in where it sits inside.
The embossed plate mark runs 2.0 to 2.5 mm outside the printed rule and stays out of the picture, as does the wide paper margin of the atlas leaf. The engraved plate number 1 sits inside the rule at the lower right and is printed.
The fold
The plate was printed on a sheet wider than the book and folded once to be bound. The fold runs vertically down the middle of the picture. It is in the library's file and it prints. We do not retouch it out, on the same principle that keeps the broken corners on our Atkins cyanotypes: what three and a half centuries did to the object is not damage to be repaired in software.
Why the sheet is square
Neither the file nor the border decided this one. The scan would carry an image 68 cm wide at our 300 dpi floor, so resolution is not the limit. The shape is. The plate is 1.17 times as wide as it is tall, and nothing on our sheet ladder is that shape — a 50 × 40 sheet would leave about two centimetres above and below, and every larger sheet we stock is a long rectangle that would strand some fifteen centimetres of paper at either side. The square sheet is the closest fit, so the large size prints the plate at its own size and stops there.
What we are allowed to sell
The work. Printed in Amsterdam in 1661. Whichever death date is taken for Cellarius — 1665 in the standard literature, 1709 in the library's authority record — the seventy-year term in Switzerland, the EU and the UK expired centuries ago, and the United States threshold of publication before 1930 is met by an order of magnitude. Public domain in every market we ship to.
The photograph. The Zentralbibliothek Zürich publishes this digitisation under the Public Domain Mark — no rights reserved on the scan. It asks, as a scholarly courtesy rather than a condition, that the source be named with author, location and persistent identifier, which is done on the product page and here. A faithful reproduction of a flat public-domain work creates no new right in any of our markets.
What we do not claim. This is a giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks. It is not a seventeenth-century plate and is not sold as one.
A note on the technique
The Zurich catalogue describes the plates of this atlas as etchings; most of the literature calls them copper engravings. Both are partly right — the plates combine engraving and etching, as most large Dutch book plates of the period do. We say copper engraving on the product page and record the library's own term here rather than quietly choosing one.
Framing this sheet
- 50 × 50 cm sheet
- A 50 × 50 cm frame, no mat. Nearest standard 20 × 20 in. Margins 4.00 cm each side, 6.61 above, 7.60 below.
- 70 × 70 cm sheet
- A 70 × 70 cm frame. Nearest standard 28 × 28 in. Margins 9.33 cm each side, 12.21 above, 14.04 below.
- If you mat it
- Go one frame size up and cut the window three millimetres inside the printed image on every side: 41.4 × 35.19 cm for the small sheet, 50.74 × 43.15 cm for the large one. Off-white or warm white board, acid-free. Do not trim the sheet.
Please measure before you buy or cut. These figures describe the file we print from. Sheets are cut by machine to about a millimetre and frames vary between makers. We replace a print that arrives damaged or wrong; we cannot replace a frame or mat that turns out not to fit.
The companion plate
Plate 4 of the same atlas draws the Copernican system, with the sun in the middle, in the same hand and the same size, on the same two sheets. Its record is here.
All records: museartis.com/pages/sheet-records · Questions: info@museartis.com