The maps from Emanuel Bowen and Thomas Kitchin’s beautiful ‘Large English Atlas’ were first sold separately and early issues of the work can be found with varying contents. The project began at the hands of the publisher John Hinton before he ran into financial difficulties. They are superb clear and concise engravings. In the history of English county atlases it is hard to think of one with finer quality. Wardington praised the book saying that ‘the size of the plate presented the publishers, the engravers and the printers with as formidable a task as any posed by the finest productions of Louis XIV or XV, the best of the Dutch engravings fifty years earlier, or the Ordnance Survey sheets fifty years later’. Hodson 221 provides a thorough account of the complex history of this atlas, which was finally completed and issued with a title-page in c.1762. This example of the map of the North Riding of Yorkshire was issued following the death of John Bowles in the summer of 1779. Here though Robert Wilkinson’s imprint was never added. He appears to have acquired the stock quickly as by December he had taken delivery of 150 printed ‘Titles to Large English Atlas, Broadside’. Chubb 199; Hodson 227 & p. 137 state e; Rawnsley 25.