The FIRST EDITION and ONE OF ONLY TWO KNOWN EXAMPLES. Matthew Simmons (fl.1635-54) is most associated with printing John Milton’s works but in 1635 he published his one and only cartographic work ‘A Direction for the English Traviller’. Known famously as the thumb nail 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 re-engraved slightly larger. In this work he added text and entitled it the ‘Booke of the Names’. It lists all of the hundreds alphabetically in each county, with the number of towns and parishes in each one. The data is copied from the text on the verso of the John Speed county maps in the ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’. This example is from the Eric Gardner collection and was for many years the only known example as cited in Skelton. In 2003 another example appeared at auction with complete title page which was dated 1649. This example lacks the maps of Bedford, Berkshire, Buckingham, Cambridge, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Essex, Hereford, Huntingdon, Kent, Lancashire, Lincoln, Middlesex, Stafford and Suffolk.

In 1649 Charles I was executed bringing to an end the English Civil War. The purpose of the initial text is so closely tied to the Quartermaster Map of 1644 that it is not impossible that it was first issued at an earlier date. Whether or not it was bound with the atlas at the same time is speculation. The Quarter Master map was so named because as its title stated it was ‘Usefull for all Comanders for Quarteringe of Souldiers, & all sorts of Persons’. Provenance: Dr. Eric Gardner; Clive A. Burden 1993; private English collection. Not in Chubb (1927); not in ESTC; Skelton (1970) 26.