George Frederick Cruchley (1797-1880) had learned his trade with Aaron Arrowsmith and began to work for himself in 1823. His early days concentrated on publishing maps of London but following the death of John Cary in 1834 he acquired much of the stock from the surviving heirs. Cruchley made lithographic transfers from the plates until he sold them all in 1877. Cruchley’s main marketing tool was to add to the original plates details of the railway’s, postal, telegraph and other useful information. These particular maps are from John Cary’s New English Atlas, 1809. Cruchley used them mainly for separately issued folding maps of each county. Here we find them together as Cruchley’s ‘Railway & Telegraphic County Atlas of England & Wales’. Those of Durham and Yorkshire bear the latest date of January 1st 1858 which is generally considered to be the date of the first edition. Of special note in this example is the inclusion of 22 of WILLIAM SMITH’S GEOLOGICAL county maps as originally produced by John Cary. All examples of Smith’s county maps are rare and here we find early examples of them. Only the unfinished map of Somerset is missing from the full compliment of the work which was left unfinished in 1824.

The title page boasts that the maps bear a number of ‘distinctive characters’. Amongst these are that they are on the ‘largest scale yet adopted for any similar purpose’, and that the ‘continuation of each Railway into adjoining Counties is accurately delineated, exhibiting at a glance facilities of intercommunication and thus supplying an important desideratum to Commercialists’. Provenance: private English collection. Beresiner pp. 93-5; Fordham (1925) p. 106; Nicholson (2003) ‘G. F. Cruchley and ‘Maps for the Million”, in IMCoS Journal 93 pp. 21-38; Smith, ‘George Frederick Cruchley, 1796-1880’, in The Map Collector no. 49 pp. 16-22.