In a Washington Post story last month, described how Reddit helped in the identification of a very rare atlas.
“A reference librarian at the National Library of Norway came across an old Ottoman atlas in the collections there that seemed perfect for a Reddit board devoted to the appreciation of maps. Weeks later, he figured out that the map in question was a previously-unknown copy of one of the rarest atlases in the world: the Cedid Atlas.
“The librarian, Anders Kvernberg, otherwise known as Reddit user PisseGuri82, posted an image from the atlas to r/mapporn … He simply identified the map — which he pieced together from scans of different pages from the atlas — as an Ottoman world map from 1803. …
“The atlas went back into the library’s collections, where it would have stayed, ignored, had Kvernberg not seen a post two weeks later from another r/mapporn user who posted an Ottoman map of Africa from the same year. …
“As Kvernberg learned more about the rare book, the Library of Congress’s page scans started to look very familiar. ‘Then I realized this was the very same atlas I had held in my hands a few weeks earlier,’ Kvernberg wrote on Reddit.
“ ‘I ran off to tell our expert on maps, Benedicte Gamborg Briså, that I had something I thought she should take a look at,’ Kvernberg told The Post. …
“Briså told The Post that the National Library of Norway’s copy of the Cedid Atlas is the 15th known surviving copy — 14 others are held by various libraries around the world.”
Read the whole saga here. Three cheers for highbrow Redditors!
Photo: Nikolaj Blegvad, The National Library of Norway
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