Minds in the Margins: Annotators Bringing Books to Life
“We recently had a remarkable copy of Apianus’s Cosmographicus liber (1533), a treatise on geography and astronomy. Its value lies in the extensive annotations, especially in the one on leaf XXXIV, shown below. The note corrects the text by adding the name of Columbus as one of America’s discoverers alongside Vespucci, and reports a learned tradition that America was known to Augustan Rome by quoting two lines from the Aeneid.”