Globes have been an ever present in the grand salons, libraries and drawing rooms of Europe’s elite almost from the moment they were conceived, sitting favourably among a room of master paintings. They were entirely handmade at the outset, with the industrial revolution a few hundred years away, so their aesthetic and majesty held up well against a Rembrandt.
The first globes were manuscript globes and consisted of a sphere which was pasted over with paper, with the cartography added painstakingly by hand. Half the
