151. Thomas Murby 1874

Thomas Murby was active from 1860 until the early-1880s.¹ His first publications were books of music for schools. In 1861 he printed a set of musically arranged tales and songs for Chambers’s Library for Young People after which he seems to have specialised in the educational sector producing books on a wide variety of subjects. Books on arithmetic, children’s readers, lessons in animal physiology and even a grammar came out of his publishing house.

Thomas Murby produced a part series of educational booklets with maps c.1874.² Apparently only a few counties were published, each containing a brief description of the county taken from existing sources, together with a county map: Stafford, Norfolk, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Devon and a double sheet map of Yorkshire. Some of the maps in this series were engraved by W Dickes, who was known as an illustrator and publisher who experimented with the Baxter process, whereby printing is carried out using oil colours from several blocks, both wood and copper.³

Murby produced few other maps: apart from this series he published a series of wall maps of the continents (and one map of Palestine), all produced photolithographically from reliefs (c.1874), but he did publish a small atlas of 16 maps, Murby’s Scholars’ Atlas (c.1878).

Size: 100 x 135 mm.                                                                                                                                                       English Miles (10 = 15 mm).

THE COUNTY OF DEVONSHIRE. Imprint: THOS. MURBY. 32 BOUVERIE ST. FLEET ST. (CeOS).