Atlas page from an 1858 French Atlas: "France and its Colonies" by Alexandre Vuillemin and Ernest Poirée ( Title in French: La France et ses Colonies: Atlas illustré cent cartes dressées d'après les cartes de Cassini, du Dépot de la guerre, des Ponts-et-chaussées et de la Marine par Vuillemin. Texte redigé d'après les documents officiels et sur un plan entièrement nouveau. réunissant en forme de tableaux 1° La Division administrative, politique, judiciaire, religieuse, militaire, etc. ; 2° Les Vicissitudes historiques; 3° La Biographie; 4° La Statistique; 5° Les Ressources agricoles, industrielles, commerciales; 6° Les établissements d'instruction ou d'utilité publique; 7° la description détaillée de tous les chefs-lieux d'arrondissement et de lieux remarquables; 8° Enfin les Curiosités de la Physionomie morale de chaque département et de chaque colonie française par Ernest Poirée.)

This atlas had maps of all the French Departments and overseas possessions of the time. Vuillemin's maps are noted for the extensive margin illustrations - vignettes, famous people, and views of cities. Each map was titled with a different font, and the fonts, decorations and marginalia changed with each subsequent edition. Later editions were often more elaborate and sometimes larger than the maps I have scanned here.

It is often hard to tell what the product will actually look like, especially on shirts, prints and other larger scale products. This product is made from a very high resolution file which gives intricate detail and wonderful resolution. Here is a sample detail from the master files used to create our maps, which should give a better idea of what the resolution on the product will look like. This is probably not the exact map shown (it is a detail from the map of Aveyron), but all these Vuillemin maps are made from a similar sized files. If you click the image it will open a larger detail image file to view.

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Options such as border sizes, background and border colours, and certain text may be edited and changed if you like. Just click the customise button.

This image has been edited to adjust for age and discoloration, and to repair any major defects.

The images are reproduced here from very high resolution files, so you can be confident that the quality will remain the best. The images have been edited and cleaned up.

Image courtesy of OldBookArt.com. Visit their Blog or their Gallery to find thousands of other free images and maps from public domain sources.

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Many Images are from Books and Maps for Sale at ZephyrusBooks.com .

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