Join us for our monthly Third Thursday in the Clark Library, where we’ll celebrate the maps of Henry Vignaud and get a glimpse into the history of the Golden Age of mapmaking in 17th century Amsterdam.

The University of Michigan acquired the extensive personal library of Vignaud, an American diplomat living in Paris, in 1922. It included thousands of books, atlases, maps, and other publications, with many of the maps extracted from broken atlases originally published by the illustrious Hondius and Janssonius publishing houses. Staff in the Clark Library sought to organize these fascinating maps based on their physical characteristics and similarities, with the ultimate goal of reassembling the original atlases.