THE first map to bear the word America has been discovered among ephemera accumulated by an amateur collector over 40 years.

Dating from 1507 and one of only four surviving examples of the oldest printed map of the New World, its existence was unknown until a newspaper picture caught the attention of its German owner as he drank his morning coffee.

The owner cannot recall where he bought it, let alone what he paid for it. He fished it out from his hoard of papers only because he had stumbled across on article on Martin Waldseemuller, the 16th- century German cartographer, and his map of the world.

As he read the Frankfurter Allgemeine, his eye was caught by a photograph of Waldseemuller’s map of the world. Its distinctive jagged outline looked just like something he had in his own collection.

He took it to his local Christie’s representative, who sent it to London, where book and map specialists confirmed that it was, indeed, the work of Waldseemuller — a piece of history that literally put America on the map. Only three other examples have survived.

Tom Lamb, director of Christie’s Book and Manuscript Department, said: “This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career, and represents the pinnacle in the history of map-making.

“This simple sheet of paper holds so many new and anticipated discoveries, all created with an enormous leap of faith by a venerable geographer in a small town in Lorraine.” The map, which Christie’s describes as “truly groundbreaking”, also offers the first printed portrayal of the Earth as a globe, the first time that the continents of North and South America had been individually distinguished and the first depiction of a Pacific Ocean.

It will be offered at Christie’s on June 8, when it is expected to excite collectors worldwide into bidding up to £800,000 to acquire it. There is likely to be extensive interest, as the other three examples are all out of reach in public institutions in the United States and Germany — the University of Minnesota, the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the Bibliothek Stadtbucherei, Offenburg. In 2003, a larger wall map, with the later date of around 1515, was purchased privately by the Library of Congress in Washington for $10 million (£5.6 million).

The discovered example was created during the Great Age of European Exploration and Discovery, from 1492 to 1522, when explorers from Spain, Italy and Portugal sailed the seas and returned with stories about the New World.

Mr Lamb said: “Until this map was published, the conception of the world was based on the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks.”

In 1505, Rene II, the Duke of Lorraine, brought together a group of scholars, led by Waldseemuller, to the Monastery of Saint Die des Vosges, near Strasbourg, to work on a new map of the world. The scholars published thier work in 1507, which argued the existence of a new land mass to the West.

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