Biographie de Joan Blaeu
Joan Blaeu (1596 Alkmaar - 1673 Amsterdam) was the son of Willem Blaeu and a leading Dutch cartographer. In 1620 he became a doctor of law and subsequently joined his father's workshop. In 1635 they published the two-volume Novas Atlas (Theatrum orbis terrarum, sire, Atlas novus). Joan and his brother Cornelius took over the workshop after their father had died in 1638. Joan became the official cartographer of the Dutch East India Company. Around 1649 he published a collection of Dutch cite maps entitled Tooneel der Steeden (Theater of Cities). In 1651 he was voted into the Amsterdam council. In 1654 he published the first atlas of Scotland. In 1662 he reissued the atlas in II volumes, known as the Atlas major. A cosmology was planned as his next project, but a fire destroyed the workshop in 1672.
Peter Van der Krogt, the leading expert in the field of Dutch atlases, is a collaborator on the Explokart Research Program for The Histoty of Cartography at the University of Utrecht's Faculty of Geosciences. Since 1990 he has been working on Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici, the carto-bibliography of atlases published in the Netherlands. 1-lis second project is the compilation, in cooperation with the Nijmegen University, of an illustrated and annotated catalogue of the Blaeu-Van der Hem Atlas, the mort important multi-volume atlas preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, which was added to Unesco's "Memory of the World" register in 2004.