MAP SOURCES
The book starts with images by kind permission of both the British Library and the Bodleian showing some of the earliest maps to depict the Channel Islands including the Gough map of Great Britain and one of the earliest Venetian “portolans” or Venetian merchants maps.
The bulk of the material in the book comes from the Priaulx Library’s extensive collection, which includes works by all the principal map makers of their day, including Wagenhauer, Mercator, Norden, Jansson, Blaeu, Speed, Dobreé, Bellin and Faden to name but a few.
The Priaulx material is supplemented by maps from the Clarke Collection, which is held by The States of Jersey Archives. This hugely impressive collection of Channel Island and Jersey maps includes the rare Polyolbion, which rather bizarrely, depicts the islands as nymphs as well as a very high quality selection of Jersey material.
We also sourced an original colour copy of De Suasmarez’s famous and very beautiful 1727 map of the Channel Islands from the UK Hydrographic Office and it is reproduced in the book in colour for the first time, as is the copy of Grey’s map of 1816 hand drawn by Peter Le Lievre and shown below.
We have made sure to include images and charts of Alderney, Sark and Herm with some exceptionally beautiful hand drawn maps from the turn of the last century and Popinjay’s famous map of Herm. By kind permission of Guernsey’s Royal Court the book also has Thomas Phillips’ maps taken from the Legge Report [The King’s Survey of The Channel Islands 1680], which we published in 2011.
The Royal Court also gave us permission to create a new map of Guernsey in 1944 by combining some 13 coastal maps depicting the fortifications and taken from the Festung Guernsey, which we first published in 2007. These combine to create an image of the whole island and its principal fortifications. This and many of the hand drawn maps are published here for the first time.