The first edition issued prior to the Great Fire of London in 1666. Matthew Simmons is most associated with printing John Milton’s works. In 1635 he published his one and only cartographic work ‘A Direction for the English Traviller’. Known famously as the thumbnail maps due to their size the three editions of this work are all exceedingly scarce. The maps were engraved by Jacob van Langeren and incorporated into a plate containing a distance table for the county, an invention of John Norden’s in 1625. In 1643 Thomas Jenner published an improved edition with four extra folding plates, three of which were maps of England, Wales and Yorkshire. For this edition the van Langeren maps were entirely re-engraved slightly larger. In 1649 he added descriptive typographic text and published it as ‘A Booke of the Names of all the Hundreds’, of which only one complete example is known. This was followed in 1657 by the slightly renamed work offered here. Provenance: with early manuscript ownership inscription of Peter Lightfoote whose initials are blind embossed on the covers. One Peter Lightfoote is recorded as being a Treasurer of Cambridge in 1662; Phillips, London 14 May 1992, lot 40. Bennett (1996) p. 8; Chubb 49; Shirley BL T.Lang 1h; Skelton 62; Wing D1528.