Discovery Editions’ Old California Map Collection perfectly re-creates the cartographic mythology of California from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th.

Pierre DuVal's 1659 Le Planisphere Autremont La Carte Du Monde Terrestre is an early and beautiful example of the notion that California is a world -- or at least an island -- unto itself. Cellarius' 1660 Harmonia Macrocosmica provides what must be Hollywood's first-ever Star Map: its Hæmisphærium stellatum Australe aequali sphærum proportione is an imagined view from distant space through the constellations of the Southern celestial hemisphere to Earth. It superimposes the stars of Orion on the island of California.

Vincenzo Coronelli's 1688 America Settentrionale (North America) was the most accurate and comprehensively detailed map of North America in the late 17th century and one of the last to depict an insular California. It precisely details the coastline and names Mendocino, Point Reyes, the Golden Gate, Santa Barbara and San Diego. In an elaborate inscription, Coronelli notes that California's discoverer, Hernan Cortes, speculated in 1534 that the island might be a peninsula attached to New Spain.

Fast forward to Samuel Augustus Mitchell's 1846 New Map of Texas, Oregon and California, the definitive map of its time and the very one used by the early fortune seekers to find their way to the mother lode in the place we still know as the Golden State. Three decades later, the 1876 Guide Map of the City of San Francisco richly details the dramatic post-Gold Rush development of the city, showing the original cable car routes just three years after the now famous cable car system began operation.

The 1853 Preliminary Sketch of Santa Barbara by the U.S. Coast Survey shows the first clear signs of the establishment of a small town just below the mission marked by Coronelli in 1688.

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