Thursday, June 16, 2011

'A Mapp Shewing The Order & Causes of Salvation & Damnation' by John Bunyan

John Bunyan (1628 - 1688) is best known as the author of Pilgrim's Progress and other books like The Holy War. Here's his Wikipedia biography. He also seems to have been a bit of a graphic designer to, as the image below shows, the first version of which was created by Bunyan in 1644.
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You can see a larger PDF version here. It is said to have been based on the earlier works of William Perkins (1558-1602), called 'A Golden Chain' (see example here). Even though the age we live in is highly visual, diagrams like these can look a bit strange and esoteric to us. (Main image above from this Flickr page)

2 comments:

An Aul Han said...

Looks like many of the plates in 'The secret teachings of all the ages'.

Mark Thompson said...

I once had 2 copies of that book, a huge hardback colour one and a smaller softback black and white one. Couldn't make head nor tail of it but then again I don't think I was one of the intended readership!