I'm fascinated by all the pictures and by the way they're presented. And the stories! Every time I open the book I find something new. The closer Sebastian Münster was to home, the more realistic his descriptions and illustrations; and the further away from home, the more imaginative or even fanciful were his illustrations and statements.
He was writing in an age when the world was being discovered and yet almost no one could travel – the perfect book for such a time. With Münster's Cosmographei or Cosmographia, you could travel the world and make discoveries even while sitting in the comfort of your home. Sebastian Münster wrote his Cosmographia in German at a time when everyone still wrote in Latin. That increased the book's popularity so that it was the most widely read book after the Bible.
Günther Wessel wrote a book about Münster's Cosmographia, which he entitled "The Man Who Stayed at Home to Discover the World". Wessel's book, which we also have in the Iron Library's collection, tells us a lot about the way people saw the world five hundred years ago. And it definitely helps you understand Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia even better. It's a good idea to read the two books together.
