Stanford's London Atlas of Universal Geography, exhibiting the Physical and Political Divisions of the Various Countries of the World.

£2,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

The Stanford company reprinted their ‘London Atlas of Universal Geography’ in 1904, the title-page so dated, and continued to issue editions with the preliminaries unchanged, but individual maps revised and updated, noting these changes in a “secret” date code outside the lower border of the map. In this copy, the the latest printed date is 13408 (i.e. 13th April 1908) but the map of the Antarctic has been silently updated to 1909, inserting the route of Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1909, which came within a hundred miles of the South Pole, before being forced to turn back, in early January 1909.

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