To the Honourable House of Representatives of the Freemen of Pennsylvania this Map of the City and Liberties of Philadelphia With the Catologue of Purchasers is Humbly Dedicated by their most Obedient Humble Servant John Reed [1846, Anastatic Process].

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Very good example of this 1846 map—five feet in length—of Philadelphia and its environs printed using the anastatic printing process; the first facsimile of John Reed’s 1774 map, being titled the same. Americanist Henry Stevens noted, as the map does itself, that only 200 copies of this 1846 map were printed, the plates then destroyed. (As an aside, Edgar Allan Poe wrote of the anastatic process a year before this map’s publication; “Anastatic Printing” in Broadway Journal, April 12, 1845.)

This 1846 iteration was published by Lloyd Pearsall Smith (1822-1886), a self-described law bookseller. The map presents a list of William Penn’s first land purchasers, various illustrative and decorative elements (such as Pennsylvania Hospital and Alms House and State House), delineated properties, and a “ground plan of the city of Philadelphia” as well as an elaborate cartouche.

OCLC, under various accession numbers, returns examples at Winterthur, Haverford, Univ of Pittsburgh, Hagley, Indiana State, LOC (describing its copy as imperfect); four of these six locations being in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The 1774 map sold at a Copley Sale in 2011 for $22,500. Sothebys noting, in part, that it was “one of rarest and most significant maps of Philadelphia” and further adding: “Reed’s highly detailed map was already scarce by the first half of the nineteenth century, and at least three full-size facsimiles were called for, the first in 1846.”

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