Welcome to Cosmographia, a publisher of soulful books.
Here are our titles:
WHAT IS A COSMOGRAPHIA?
A Cosmographia is a map. A very special kind of map. Many philosophers, including Ptolemy, Münster, and Silvestris, produced works titled "Cosmographia." Basically a Cosmographia is a Latin philosophical allegory, dealing with the creation of the universe. But when deciding on a name for the press, Nina Alvarez was especially compelled by the Cosmographia of the fifteenth-century German cartographer Sebastian Münster. His Cosmographia of 1544 was the earliest German-language description of the world.
"Münster's Cosmographia was an immensely influential book that attempted to describe the entire world across all of human history and analyze its constituent elements of geography, history, ethnography, zoology, and botany." (From the summary of The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation.)
To attempt to describe the world on multiple simultaneous planes. To attempt to map not just a flat geography, but a living geography, a vertical geography. That is what Cosmographia means to us.
As was written in 585 Magazine about our little press, "Today’s scholars may not be producing cumbersome tomes describing the whole of the universe, but many, like Rochester’s Nina Alvarez, bring this same global and multidisciplinary sensibility to publishing."
