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Jan (Joan) Willemsz. Blaeu was a Dutch cartographer, publisher and judge.
Jan was born into the family of the cartographer and publisher Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638). He studied in Leiden, where he earned a doctorate in law, and in Padua. He then began to assist his father, who was engaged in the manufacture of globes and maps. After his father's death, Jan, together with his brother Cornelius, continued his work, and succeeded him as cartographer for the Dutch East India Company.
In 1651 Blaeu was elected to the Amsterdam city council and later appointed as a judge. At the same time, he was engaged in his publishing business: he continued to publish volumes of Atlas novus, which contained maps of English counties and, for the first time, an atlas of Scotland, as well as one volume of maps of the Far East.
Blaeu did not have time to complete his most ambitious project, but it made him famous as the author of the famous 11-volume Dutch atlas. Based on his previous maps, Blaeu created the Great Atlas (Atlas Maior) - it contained nearly 600 maps and a total of 3,000 pages of Latin text - and was published in 1662. Blaeu's maps were groundbreaking for their time because they were created in accordance with the heliocentric theories of Nicolaus Copernicus.
In 1672, a great fire in Amsterdam destroyed Blaeu's workshop, and the cartographer died a year later, apparently never recovering from this stroke of fate.
Willem Janszoon Blaeu was a Dutch cartographer and map publisher.
Willem studied astronomy and cartography under the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe and even discovered the variable star P Swan in 1600. A little later Blaeu settled in Amsterdam, where he began making globes and also began producing land and sea maps, including a 1605 world map. In 1629 he managed to acquire the printing plates of the cartographer Jodok Hondius, with which he published his own atlas.
In 1633, Willem Blaeu was appointed cartographer of the Dutch Republic, as well as the official cartographer of the Dutch East India Company. Blau built up a large collection of maps and conducted an extensive publishing business. After Willem's death, his sons Jan Blaeu (1596-1673) and Cornelius Blaeu successfully continued his work. But in 1672, during a fire in Amsterdam, Blaeu's workshop was destroyed, and the company founded by Willem Blaeu ceased to exist in 1698.
Samuel Johnson was an English writer who made lasting contributions as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. He was a devout Anglican, and a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls him «arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history». James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson was selected by Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate as «the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature».
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a British writer and poet, translator, philologist, and linguist.
Tolkien wrote many works in the genre of magical fiction. He became world famous for his fantasy books The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55).
"The Hobbit" was published in 1937 with drawings by the author and proved so popular that the publisher asked him to write a sequel. The result, 17 years later, was Tolkien's masterpiece, "The Lord of the Rings," which was voted the best book of the 20th century. By the beginning of the 21st century, more than 50 million copies had been sold in 30 languages. The film version of "The Lord of the Rings" by New Zealand director Peter Jackson, released in three parts in 2001-2003, broke world viewing records.
Tolkien has been called the "father" of modern high fantasy literature.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an Italian humanist scholar, writer and poet of the Early Renaissance.
Boccaccio was the son of a Tuscan merchant who sent him to Naples to study business and law. Giovanni revolved in aristocratic circles there and became acquainted with Petrarch's work. In Naples he wrote his first works of poetry, raising the poetry of Italian minstrelsy to literature. Returning to Florence in 1341, Boccaccio, in addition to the famous book of witty short stories "Decameron" (1348-1353), created many poems, allegories and prose works.
In 1350 at Bocaccio's house in Florence, he met Petrarch, which developed into a friendship. In the last years of his life he concentrated on scholarly works in Latin, including writing De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus..., - this alphabetical list of mountains, forests, rivers and lakes was based on the writings of ancient poets. His other Latin works include the philosophical and historical De claris mulieribus (a collection of biographies of famous women, 1360-74) and De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men, 1355-74).
Giovanni Boccaccio had a significant influence on the development of all European culture through his work. Together with Petrarch, he laid the foundations of Renaissance humanism and raised popular literature to the level and status of the ancient classics.
