For more than three hundred years the only surviving copies of what are arguably two of the most important maps in the history of cartography, the 1507 and 1516 World Maps by Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470–ca. 1522), sat unknown on the shelves of a library in the castle of a prince. The owner was Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg, of Württenberg, Germany. The maps were rediscovered there in 1901 by the Jesuit historian Josef Fischer (1858–1944), who found them bound into a single portfolio, now known as the “Schöner Sammelband,” by the Nuremburg globe–maker and mathematician Johannes Schöner (1477–1547).
