Physical globe

This copy belongs to one of the six editions of Romer globes (it is worth boasting that in the collection of the Wincenty Field Manor House there is already a set of them), i.e., using maps by the outstanding Polish cartographer, Professor Eugeniusz Romer (1871-1954).

In 1921 he founded the Cartographic Institute in Lviv (which operated until 1939), and three years later the publishing house Książnica-Atlas (which operated in Lviv until 1941, and then between 1946 and 1951 in Wrocław; later it was taken over by the State Cartographic Publishing Company). This publishing house, one of the largest in interwar Poland, produced not only maps and atlases, but also cartographic scientific instruments – globes.

We are dealing here with the first edition of a globe under the ‘Książnica-Atlas’ brand, and at the same time the first one in which a hypsometric map was used to depict the relief of the terrain. Let us add that the selection of contour lines (0, 300, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000 and 5000 m above sea level) and bathymetric lines (2000, 2000, 4000 and 7000 m) and the colour scale (for the land from green to red and for the sea from beige to dark blue) proposed by Professor Romer gave Polish cartography its characteristic style, called the Romer school. Another of its features was a significant degree of generalisation of maps, i.e., reduction of their content to improve legibility.

Six copies of this edition are currently known; most of them are in private collections. This copy came into our collection in 1985 as a gift from the Primary School in Biskupice Ołoboczne (Wielkopolskie Voivodeship), as part of the then ‘Old Globe in Exchange for a New One’ campaign conducted by our museum.