The letter to Medici was printed very soon after it was written. The first issue, entitled _Mundus Novus_, consisting of four 4to leaves, and the second, _Epistola Albericij de Novo Mundo_, are without place or date. A copy of the third, printed at Augsburg in 1504, and entitled _Mundus Novus_, is in the Grenville Library. Then followed two others, and the sixth issue was the early Paris edition of Jean Lambert, a copy of which is in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Another Paris edition, nearly as old, is in the Grenville Library. In 1505, an issue, entitled _De Ora Antarctica_, and edited by Ringmann, appeared at Strasbourg. The letter was also included in the book of voyages, _Paesi novamente retrovati_, printed at Vicenza in 1507, where it was called _Novo Mondo da Alb. Vesputio_. It was thus widely circulated over Europe, and Vespucci obtained the credit of discoveries made by the unnamed Portuguese commander. The title, _Novus Mundus_, is taken from the opening boast of his letter, that it is lawful to call the discovery _a new world_ because no one had ever seen it before. It was thus that Vespucci got his name connected, throughout Europe, with the discovery of a New World, and this prepared the way for the proposal to give it the name of America!
The more important letter of Vespucci, containing the account of his alleged four voyages, was written in September 1504, a short time before he left Portugal. A copy, in French, was sent to René II, Duke of Lorraine, while the Italian original was addressed to a "Magnificent Lord", who is supposed, with much probability, to have been Piero Soderini, the Gonfaloniere of Florence from 1502 to 1512. Vespucci speaks of him as having been his schoolfellow, and as being, at the time the letter was written, in a high official position at Florence.
The French copy was translated into Latin, and published at St. Dié in April 1507, in the _Cosmographiæ Introductio_, a rare little book by the Professor of Cosmography at the University of St. Dié in Lorraine, named Martin Waldzeemüller, who used the _nom de plume_ of Hylacomylus. The Italian version was also printed at an early date, a little volume in quarto of thirty-two pages, without place or year. It is excessively rare, only four copies being known to exist. One belonged to Baccio Valori, and from it Bandini published a new edition in 1745. It was afterwards the property of the Marchese Gino Capponi. The second belonged to Gaetano Poggiale of Leghorn, and is now in the Palatine Library at Florence. The third is in the Grenville Library. The fourth belonged to the Carthusian Monastery at Seville, and was bought by Varnhagen in 1863 at Havanna.[33]