The essays in The Mercator Atlas of Europe book have been contributed by an international team of distinguished map scholars.

Editor Marcel Watelet earned a Ph.D. in history. Specialising in the history of cartography, he serves as scientific attache in the Ministry of Equipment and Transportation and as director of Mercator Consulting SPRL. Dr. Watelet has published or edited a number of publications on topics as diverse as Belgian cartography and politics of the nineteenth century, the city of Berlin, and the cosmography of Gerardus Mercator. He was editor of Gerard Mercator, cosmographe, published in 1994 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Mercator's death.

James R. Akerman is director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he has served since 1987. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests center on the social and political aspects of cartography in Europe and the United States, and particularly the history of atlases, educational cartography, and transportation cartography. Related contributions by Dr. Akerman can be found in From Books with Maps to Books as Maps: The Editor in the Creation of the Atlas Idea, edited by Joan Winearls and published by the University of Toronto Press (1995), and "The Structuring of Political Territory in Early Printed Atlases", Imago Mundi Number 47, (1995).

A diplomatic historian by training, Peter M. Barber has been deputy map librarian in the British Library in London, with special responsibility for manuscript maps, since 1987. He is perhaps best-known as the co-author (with Christopher Board) of Tales from the Map Room, a book published in 1993 to accompany the BBC television series, to which he acted as consultant. He has published extensively on medieval world maps, on British mapmaking in the sixteenth century, on the British Library's cartographical and topographical collections, and on map use and the relationship between mapping and government in the early modern period.

Professor Dr. Arthur Dürst has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the fields of education, the history of cartography, and historical geography. A frequent guest lecturer in Europe and the United States, he was head teacher at the Hohe Promenade School and Professor of Geography at the University of Zurich. A corresponding editor for Imago Mundi and one of five founders of Cartographica Helvetica, Professor Dürst has published more than 90 articles and books on historical cartography and, in 1992, donated a portion (over 6,000 books) of his extensive personal library to the State Library of his native Swiss Canton of Glarus. In 1995, he was made an honorary member of the Swiss Society for Cartography.

Mireille Pastoureau is director of the Library of the Institute of France. Prior to her current position, she served as conservator-in-chief of the Department of Maps and Plans in the National Library in Paris. She is the author of Les atlas francais, XVIe - XVIIe siecles, published by the National Library (1984), and Nicolas Sanson d'Abbeville, Atlas du Monde, 1665, published by the National Bank of Paris (1990).