Orcel, Gian Giuseppe (fl. c. 1775 - 1793)

Gian Giuseppe Orcel (fl. c. 1775 - 1793) was a French bookseller and publisher based in Palermo, Sicily, during the second half of the 18th century. Orcel opened a bookshop in Palermo, operating in partnership the brothers Martinon, one of who had a shop in Messina. Orcel and a few others were solely responsible for selling and publishing foreign language titles in Sicily and thus keeping the lines of intellectual exchange open. He greatest cartographic achievement was the publication of a massive wall map of Italy based upon the original 1720 manuscript of the Austrian military officer and surveyor Samuel Graf von Schmettau, his expanded and revised map, on a much larger scale the Schmettau's 1723 publication, was the finest and largest map of Sicily yet published.