 This is the 1705 map of the LaSalle expedition. He upgraded this map a couple of years later by adding information from the Iberville expedition. It's the first map to show the mouth of the river here in any detail, and the detail is really still very, very good. But what I like about this is that since it's the LaSalle map, it shows images from the LaSalle expedition in the cartouche. The LaSalle was murdered in a mutiny by his men, and here you see the LaSalle being killed by someone. Well, after the mutiny, his men freaked, and they all started going, it's your fault. No, it's your fault. No, it's your fault. And so they started shooting each other. And here the cartouche shows the LaSalle's men shooting each other. Not the most cheerful thing for a man. This is the Framaro map of facsimile from 1450, created by a monk in Venice who was commissioned by the City Council of Venice to create a map of Mundi, a map of the world. And he took several years to do it, gathering information from travelers and merchants. He had a team of cartographers who worked with him to create the map. It is a portaling map, meaning that it highlights the ports for seafaring expeditions. One copy was given to Venice, the other to the Portuguese king. The Portuguese copy has disappeared, but the Venetian copy still hangs in a museum in Venice. When the Venetian City Council received the map in 1450, they were so disappointed by the size of Venice. It's so small and insignificant on the map, really. So this is a map that was printed in Venice in 1778. It's printed just two years after the Declaration of Independence was written during the Revolutionary War. They're using a map that is actually from 1755 that was made in England. And so they're using some of the same kind of techniques and outlines that England used in those maps. You can see on the bottom here that Florida is not exactly as we picture it today. And that's because England actually never made its way that far south, so their knowledge of Florida was not as deep as some other places. This map being printed in Venice, all of the names are translated into Italian. So you can see the Italian translation of Louisiana. We also see Native American names that are also translated into Italian, such as Cherokee. One thing that is exciting about this book, being printed in Venice, it takes on the tradition of fine Venetian printing. So we can see with the paper here that there are watermarks inside of it that tell us that it was made in Venetian paper mills. So the paper is of a really high quality, just like the day it was made. And the binding itself is very typical of the time period. And so this is a binding that in the 1600s, this would have been what would be called a limbellum binding, where the case would have been made with parchment. But since this is from the 1700s, it's using the same kind of sewing technique where you can see that it's sewn over these leather thongs. But instead of using parchment, they're using a heavier paper that's called case paper. And so it's like a paperback, but it has this thick, durable paper. And they've decorated by speckling it with paint to kind of emulate a marbling technique.