An excellent essay on Ortelius’ life and work from the Library of Congress.
Order of pages in sixteenth-century books
Finding maps on different pages in books printed by the same publisher in the same year used to be common practice. Books used to be bound at the time of sale (rather than in advance). Europe appears on page 26 of the copy with the colorful frontispiece and page 20 on the leather-bound one.
Customers could dictate the order of pages, or the publisher might put them together. Comparing the two Library of Congress copies from the same year, customers could also ask for certain maps to be included and others excluded.
The closeup of the Bosporus and Sea of Marmara can be seen in greater detail on page 20 on the leather-bound version and page 116 on the colorful frontispiece one.
The map below shows approximately the mapped areas of Europe and Africa that appear in Abraham Ortelius’ Atlas.
View Ortelius’s Europe in a larger map