The Vinland Map, dated to about A.D. 1440 - at least fifty years before Columbus landed in the Americas - is a unique map of the world that shows an outline of the northeast American coast and a legend describing its discovery in about 1000 by Leif Eiriksson, the Norseman from Greenland. The map was published by Yale University Press in 1965 and generated an enormous amount of debate. Chemical analysis of the ink later suggested that the map might be a forgery, but recent appraisals of both scientific and humanist evidence argue that it is indeed authentic. Now, on the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication, here is this classic of historical cartography in a new edition. It reprints unaltered the original text on the Vinland Map and an account of Friar John of Plano Carpini's mission to the Mongols from 1245 to 1247 (the Tartar Relation), with which the map had at some stage been bound. To this have been added a new introduction by George D. Painter, sole survivor of the original team of editors, who discusses the verification of the map's authenticity; a new essay by Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Smithsonian's American Studies Program, on the map's provenance and scientific testing; and a new discussion of the map's compositional and structural aspects by Thomas A. Cahill and Bruce H. Kusko, of the Crocker Historical and Archaeological Projects at the University of California, Davis. There is also an account by the rare-book dealer Laurence C. Witten II, who died while this new edition was in preparation, of his acquisition of the map in 1957.

'No biography has ever before thrown so much light on the making of a masterpiece. ' Raymond Mortimer. 'Mr Painter has done his work so well that it is hard to speak in moderate terms of his skill and unobtrusive wit. ' Anthony Powell. 'Brilliant and scholarly. . . . Mr Painter's greatest triumph is in his depiction of place and people, his revelation of the raw material of the novel. ' Angus Wilson. With A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU Marcel Proust achieved a perfect rendering of life in art, of the past created through memory. It is both a portrait of the artist and a discovery of the aesthetic by which the portrait is painted, and it was to have a seminal influence on twentieth-century literature. George Painter's work has brilliantly captured the life of the great writer in a TOUR DE FORCE of scholarly research and literary craft.