The first month of the Cartographer's Annual is the Mercator style pack. It tries to capture the flair and style of 16th and 17th century maps. Those centuries - the so-called "Age of Exploration" - were an era of immense European exploration and expansion and the art of cartography flourished to document and publish the newly discovered information on the shape of the world.
For a time the principal center of map making and map printing was in the Netherlands. Gerard Mercator is the most famous of those cartographers and therefore this map style is named in his honor. The Flemish mathematician, printer and mapmaker (born 1512, died 1592) compiled the first modern world atlas (titled "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum") and invented the map projection that still bears his name today.
The style pack Mercator includes