The famous Plantin Press passed into the hands of Balthasar Moretus in 1618 and he began working hard towards the publishing of a new edition of Abraham Ortelius’ ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’. Following revision of the ‘Parergon’ in 1624 he began working on updating the old copper plate maps and engraving some new ones. This work was undertaken by Arnold Floris van Langren and Ferdinand Arsenius. Theodore Moretus or Prague, Balthasar’s cousin however, began a series of negative comments about the work which resulted in the ending of the project. According to Van der Krogt towards the end of his life “Balthasar seems to have had a new interest in the ‘Theatrum’ and on 11 May 1641 Jan Galle was paid for printing 25 copies of each of the 138 plates for a Spanish edition. Balthasar Moretus died on 9 July 1641. In the 1642 inventory of his estate there were 22 copies of the Spanish ‘Theatrum’ with the plates and another 160 copies of the Spanish text without the plates. The imprint and date on the title page had not been altered … his nephew Balthasar II Moretus (1615-74), the son of Jan Moretus, took over the business. It is likely that he was responsible for the printing of the new Spanish edition.”

Van der Krogt identifies more than 60 updated maps; the text however is unaltered from the edition of 1612. Only two examples of the atlas are recorded by van der Krogt, that in the City archives of Antwerp was given by Moretus. The other example is at the Newberry Library, Chicago. In this third discovered example, of the 125 maps present 49 are in later (post 1612) states, 8 of these are previously unrecorded states including that of China. The World, America, and Pacific are all in later states. The world is known in only about 3 examples, the America survives in slightly more, and the Pacific by just the one in the National Archives of Canada. The extra 8 states are not recorded in van der Broecke. In comparing this with the collation in van der Krogt we found 7 differences. The colouring is in the style of that in the Wardington collection, i.e. outline colour instead of wash and using similar colours. It is possible that this example was put together earlier as the map supposed to be dated 1641 is not so. Broecke, Marcel P. R. van den (1996). ‘Ortelius Atlas Maps’; Van der Krogt 31.454.