Pieter Goos (1615/6-1675) was one of the more important Dutch chartmakers of the third quarter of the seventeenth century, producing a number of fine sea-atlases and charts. However, as with many of his contemporaries, his first steps were less auspicious; in about 1650, he acquired the plate stock of the recently deceased Theunisz. Jacobsz. and used this material to publish his own ‘De Lichtende Columne ofte Zee-Spieghel …’, printing editions of it for the next thirty years, in different languages, including English.
This is an early edition of the English printing, but of an unusual composition; it is a mixture of the 1658 and 1662 texts, but not an exact match of either, suggesting an intermediate edition (the page numbering for gather K is awkward), while the charts show variations to Koeman’s description of the 1662 edition; however, these atlases can be notoriously unstable, often made up of existing printing stock of text and maps, as they came to hand, and thus can often defy ready cartobibliographic description.
At this period the Dutch dominated European atlas and chart-publishing, often producing editions of their books in vernacular languages to sell into those markets, partly to generate additional sales, but also to hinder the development of domestic publishing in those places. Such vernacular editions are very scarce. Of the English editions produced by Goos, most are recorded in only one or two copies; the 1662 edition, albeit with variant text, is recorded by Koeman in six locations.
Koeman Atlantes Neerlandici, IV, Goos 35, but the text in a different setting, with variant signatures and catchwords, partly Goos 32, but with K4 to K10 numbered 78.1 to 78.12, suggesting probably incorrectly that the chart of Fierly to Portland was not included in this edition.
