Atlas Anglicanus, Or a Complete Sett of Maps of the Counties of South Britain . To which is added a Correct Map of the Roads of England, with the Distances agreable to the Mile Stones and other exact Admensurations, between the Principal Towns.

Small folio (9 4/8 x 8 2/8 inches). Double-page engraved title-page, 2 leaves of letterpress subscribers, 41 (of 45) full-sheet engraved maps, all partially handcolored in outline (lacking Hereford, Kent, Sussex, and North Wales, title-page and a few maps with short separations at central folds, a few manuscript titles shaved). Early calf, rear cover with overlapping fore-edge (rubbed, recased with renewed endpapers). Provenance: Early manuscript index, all maps numbered and titled in manuscript on the verso. First edition. Emanuel Bowen's contribution to eighteenth-century world and British atlases is substantial. Using contemporary sources, he published and drew maps for the "Complete System of Geography" (2 vols., 1744-7), "The Maps and Charts to the Modern Part of the Universal History" (published in 1766 under Thomas Kitchin's name), the celebrated maps for John Harris's "Navigantium atque itinerantium bibliotheca" (1744-8), and all twenty-two new plates in the final edition (1754) of Patrick Gordon's "Geography Anatomized", the county maps in his "Large English Atlas" (1760) the first to cover England and Wales on a large scale, and subsequently reduced by Bowen and Kitchin for their "Royal English Atlas" (ca.1763) and then by Emanuel and Thomas Bowen for "Atlas Anglicanus" (1767-8), published after Emanuel Bowen's death by Kitchin. "All three works are characterized by detailed texts in the spaces surrounding the maps and by elegant rococo decoration, which became the hallmark of his engraving" (Iolo Roberts and Menai Roberts for DNB). Chubb, Printed Maps in the Atlases of Great Britain CCXXXII.…