Waldseemüller map, 1507

A birth certificate for a continent, printed on twelve sheets of paper. In 1507 a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller, working with a small circle of scholars in the Vosges mountain town of Saint-Dié, cut this world map into woodblocks and printed roughly a thousand copies. Somewhere along the left edge, on a long thin sliver of land, he set the word "America," honoring the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who had argued that these lands were not the eastern edge of Asia but something entirely new. It was the first time the name appeared anywhere. Vespucci himself appears at the top right, holding a compass, facing the ancient geographer Ptolemy on the left, the old authority and the new discovery sharing the same page.

The map is a Renaissance object through and through, blending Ptolemy's classical projection with fresh reports from Portuguese and Spanish voyages, and filling the gaps with guesswork. Waldseemüller drew a sea west of the Americas years before any European recorded seeing the Pacific, which still puzzles historians. He seems to have had second thoughts later, dropping the name "America" from his 1513 map and labeling the land simply unknown, but by then printers across Europe had copied him and the name stuck. Of that original print run, exactly one copy survives, discovered in a German castle in 1901 and now held by the Library of Congress, which paid ten million dollars for it in 2003.