Mexico & Guatemala Map 1834 Regional Print - Mexico City, Guatemala City, Yucatan

Henry S. Tanner, already established as one of Philadelphia's most respected map publishers, issued this map of Mexico and Guatemala as part of his Universal Atlas, sold to subscribers in fifteen individually numbered parts between 1833 and 1836 at a dollar and a half apiece rather than as a single bound volume. This example survives from one of those original unbound installments, a genuinely unusual way to encounter the atlas today, since most surviving copies were bound together by their original owners shortly after purchase. Engraved by J. Knight with the careful, detailed linework Tanner's workshop was known for, the map covers a Mexico still adjusting to independence, its northern provinces of Upper California, Sonora and Chihuahua drawn as thinly populated frontier territory even as the republic's central and southern regions, including the Yucatan, appear in considerably finer administrative detail.

Mexico City anchors the map's densely detailed center, while an inset of the Valley of Mexico gives readers a closer look at the capital's immediate surroundings, a courtesy Tanner extended to major cities across his atlas series. A second inset details Guatemala separately, reflecting Central America's status at the time as the short-lived Federal Republic of Central America, itself only recently independent from both Spain and, briefly, from Mexico. Sonora and Chihuahua stretch across the map's sparse northern reaches, their vast distances leaving Tanner's engravers comparatively little confirmed detail to render. The Yucatan Peninsula, by contrast, appears with real specificity, its administrative boundaries and coastline drawn with the same careful attention given to central Mexico.

A rewarding pick for a collector of American atlas publishing history, particularly anyone drawn to unbound original parts rather than later bound volumes. TheMapVault also carries Tanner's own later Mexico and Guatemala map, issued in 1836 as part of a differently titled New Universal Atlas rather than this earlier Universal Atlas series; the two sheets share a cartographer but come from genuinely separate publications with their own numbering and format. It ships unframed, available in the full range of nine sizes from a compact desk print to a large-format piece.