The first world atlas confused Cuba with Cyprus — kottke.org

The Utrecht University Library tells the story of a 1606 edition of Gerard Mercator's Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes... that was, um, less than perfectly prepared: Mercator (of projection fame) had died in 1594. His Atlas the first "book work with maps (1585-1595) which was given the name Atlas," and popularized the term, but Abraham Ortelius's "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum" in 1570 was probably the first book we'd recognize as a modern atlas. Mercator wanted to bring scholarly, scientific precision to the work that Ortelius and a generation of mostly-Dutch commercial mapmakers had pioneered.

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