Dedication copy of Badeslade’s ‘Chorographia Britaniae’.

Badesdale’s fine county atlas of England and Wales. The atlas contains forty-two engraved maps of the counties, and four of England and Wales, together with the five engraved tables detailing high roads, cross roads, and principal towns.

“The atlas was perhaps one of the two or three of the best-selling county atlases to be published before Cary’s New and Correct English Atlas appeared in 1787. It was the first eighteenth-century county atlas to be truly pocket size (when the sheets were folded and bound on guards), and like its road-book equivalent, Britania depicta, it immediately found a substantial and hitherto unexploited market” (Hudson)

The atlas is dedicated to the Prince of Wales (1707-1751) the eldest son of George II and father of George III, as well as the great-grandfather of Queen Victoria. The present copy bears his coat-of-arms to the upper and lower cover together with the badge of the Prince of Wales of three fleur-de-lys rising through a coronet.