Some coverage of two map books published earlier this year by Bodleian Library. First, Atlas Obscura interviews Kris Butler, whose Drink Maps in Victorian Britain looks at how the temperance movement used maps to fight excessive alcohol consumption. They were, apparently, directly inspired by John Snow’s cholera map. From the interview:

Drink maps were specific to targeting the U.K. magistrates, to try to get these lawmakers to stop granting licenses. So it had a really specific legislative, regulatory goal. […] In one case [in 1882, in the borough of Over Darwen in Lancashire, England], after looking at a drink map, the magistrates decided to close half of the places to buy alcohol. Their rationale was, even if we close half of these, you still don’t have to walk more than two minutes to buy another beer, which I just think is the most beautiful rationale I’ve ever read. It was challenged, and it held up on appeal.

Meanwhile, the Bodleian’s own Map Room Blog (no relation) points to Debbie Hall’s Adventures in Maps, a book about maps and travel and exploration. From the book listing: “The twenty intriguing journeys and routes featured in this book range from distances of a few miles to great adventures across land, sea, air and space. Some describe the route that a traveller followed, some are the results of exploration and others were made to show future travellers the way to go, accompanied by useful and sometimes very beautiful maps.” I reviewed Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (also no relation) in 2016.

Adventures in Maps by Debbie Hall: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler: Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

See also: Map Books of 2024.

The Library of Congress reports on how its Preservation Research and Testing Division used multispectral imaging to bring out previously illegible place names on a 16th-century portolan chart of the east coast of North America. Initially the PRTD was brought in to confirm that the chart was legit before the Library purchased it (which it did last fall), but the faded iron gall ink in some areas of the map suggested obscured details that further analysis could draw out and place names that could be made legible again. According to the article, this represents the first time the Library has posted an enhanced image of one of their holdings.

The British Museum has posted this video about the Babylonian Map of the World, a nearly 3,000-year-old clay tablet inscribed with Akkadian script and a schematic map that is often called the oldest map in the world. The video, part of the Museum’s Curator’s Corner series, focuses on the discovery in 1995 of a missing section of the tablet, and what the inscriptions mean. Here’s the Museum’s collection listing for the tablet.

Previously: An Ancient Map of the Mesopotamian World.

Constructed in the 1680s for Louis XIV, and measuring nearly four metres in diameter and weighing a couple of tons apiece, Vincenzo Coronelli’s great globes “are a simply amazing celestial and terrestrial pair,” writes Matthew Edney, who saw them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2019. But, he goes on to say,

[T]he globes were effectively useless. Their imposing grandeur made them completely the wrong size to be used effectively. Smaller globes—made with diameters between 0.075–1.7m (3–67″)—could be easily turned to show specific parts of their convex surface. Or, people could enter within much larger globes, called georamas, turning themselves around as necessary to see all parts of the earth on the concave interior surface. Coronelli’s globes were far too large for the former, and far too small for the latter.

This unavoidable reality inverted the usual physical relationship between viewers and globes, undermining the viewer’s usual sense of intellectual domination and converting the globe-viewing experience to one of awe and amazement. As a result, no-one really knew quite what to do with them[.]

Their difficult size and limited utility is why they’ve spent most of their 340-year existence hidden from view, though they’ve been on display since 2005 at the BNF’s François-Mitterrand site (see the above BNF video, in French).

In Ireland, between 1824 and 1842 the OS completed the first ever large-scale survey of an entire country, at a scale of six inches to the mile. Acclaimed for their accuracy, these maps are regarded by cartographers as amongst the finest ever produced.

In addition to maps, the Ordnance Survey staff, both military and civilian, recorded other information such as archaeological and toponymical material including local customs, antiquities, place names and topographical features. However, over time, these materials have been disparately housed in various museums, repositories and archives across Ireland and Britain. […]

By reconnecting digitally, the OS maps, memoirs, correspondence, drawings and books of placenames into a new online resource, the project aims to open up the histories to wider audiences, enabling a richer and deeper engagement with and understanding of the OS operations in Ireland two centuries ago.

More about the project here.

Islario, Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter project, is a collection of 16th- to 19th-century maps of islands—some real, some phantom. “In Spanish, the word ‘islario’ means something like a “compendium of islands’ or an ‘atlas of islands’. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, many ‘islarios’ were created, books that contained only maps of islands. Since the traces used to draw these maps were often based on legends or comments from sailors in ports, the problem of distinguishing between real and fantastic islands arose.” In this blog post (in Spanish), Alejandro takes a look at one of the fantastic islands his book will cover: Frisland.

A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China, focuses on two extraordinary Chinese maps from the early 19th century printed using Prussian blue pigment.

These maps were presented in an extraordinary format, on eight vertical sheets printed in the style of rubbings. Even more strikingly, they were rendered in a rich blue coloring. The pigment Prussian blue had recently begun to be produced in China, and these maps were amongst the first printed objects in East Asia to make use of the colorant—predating the famous use of Prussian blue by Japanese print artists soon after.

The blue maps were more than just visually astonishing. They also captured Chinese ideas about the relationship between terrestrial and celestial space, and still provide insight today into how Chinese scholars and artists conceptualized the world around them. Beautiful and powerful in equal measure, these blue maps capture details of a transitional moment in the history of China—and the wider world. This exhibition considers these two maps in the context of their production, consumption, and functionality, revealing them as unique objects in the global history of mapmaking.

The online version is full of interesting detail about the maps’ materials and production. The physical exhibition opened last weekend and runs until 31 August 2024. Free admission.

David Stark extracted elements from a 1688 map of part of Germany to create a library of tree, hill and town signs that he thought entirely appropriate for use as map assets for a role-playing game. I look at them and see fantasy map design elements. In 2019 I noted the similarities between 16th-century maps and modern fantasy map design. Also, digitally created fantasy maps often feature clone-stamped hill signs; you could do worse than clone-stamp these if you were whipping a fantasy map up. At least there’s more than one kind of hill sign to clone-stamp: there are, in fact, 159 hills and 26 mountains—more than 400 tiny images in all, and it’s interesting that David has separate categories for towns and cities, and for hills and mountains. [via]

An online exhibition by the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) focuses on an atlas of Adriatic sea ports commissioned by Napoleon after the French Empire’s annexation of Italy in 1805. The Library’s English-language announcement:

Commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte himself and marked by exceptional scientific and artistic value, the 1806 atlas consists of charts and topographical views of the eastern part of Croatia’s Adriatic coastline, whose annexation to Napoleon’s empire prompted the atlas’s creation by famous cartographers Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, Ekerlin and Paolo Birasco.

The atlas’s significance in documenting the first scientifically based hydrographic surveying of the Adriatic in history and thus being an indispensable resource in any Adriatic-related research is matched by its exquisiteness in terms of its purely artistic features.

The Library’s copy of the atlas was acquired at a public auction in London in 1979. More about the NSK’s map collection (in English; all links in Croatian unless otherwise indicated).

An exhibition of maps from the personal collection of our friend Alejandro Polanca Masa is taking place at the municipal auditorium of his home town of Guardo, Spain. Free admission, runs until September 15. Alejandro writes (link in Spanish): “Quien pase por allí, puede disfrutarlo gratuitamente. Y mola, porque he seleccionado mapas desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1960, todos originales, que se pueden ver y tocar, incluyendo atlas y libros sobre cartografía. ¿Te lo vas a perder?”

There’s no shortage of books about phantom islands—islands on the map that later turn out never to have existed—but now the Map Men have done a video about them, using as a narrative hook the case of Sandy Island, and how it managed to stay on maps into the Google Maps era.

Here’s a short video from the BBC Global YouTube channel on the 1450 Fra Mauro map.

Related: Meredith F. Small’s Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World (Pegasus, June 2023): Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter project, Astronomy Atlas 1899, does for 19th-century astronomy atlases what his previous Geography 1880 project did for school atlases of the era: create an anthology of the best maps, drawings and diagrams from the books available to him.

In my library, in addition to the collection of geographical atlases from the 18th to the 21st century, there is a whole series of old books on astronomy, and of all of them, the ones that attract me the most are those published between 1880 and 1930. This was a time when science was developing at an astonishing rate and astronomy was changing radically. […]

In total there are twelve astronomical atlases in this library, mostly Spanish, French and English, published between 1880 and the early 1930s. From these I have selected the most interesting engravings and drawings, arranged them chronologically and given details of the original source. I have also supplemented many of them with other engravings from the Biblioteca Nacional de España and similar sources.

Digital (€18), softcover (€45) and limited-edition hardcover (€90) versions will be produced.

The Los Angeles Times has the story of a map that turned out to be far older and more valuable than anyone expected. Ann and Gordon Getty paid £56,600 for a portolan chart in 1993, restored it and put it on display in their home. After Ann died in 2020, Alex Clausen of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps paid $239,000 for it at the estate sale. The map was dated to 1500-1525, but Clausen suspected it was older and therefore even more valuable. Hundreds of hours of research and lab tests determined a new date: circa 1360, making it the oldest portolan chart in the U.S. and the fourth oldest portolan chart known overall. As for how much more valuable, Ruderman thinks it’s worth a lot more than $239,000: they’re listing it for $7.5 million. They’ve named it the Rex Tholomeus Portolan Chart, after the single human figure appearing on the map, and you can see the listing and read the 49-page catalogue (PDF).

Matthew Edney has a post on Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, about which we have seen much already; Edney’s look is deeper and more analytical. “Of special interest to me is how, despite his overtly anti-modernist subject matter and style, Sleigh nonetheless gave structure and system to his fictive panorama by giving it the trappings of normative maps and of realistic imagery more generally.”

Previously: An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland; North of Nowhere: The Osher’s Fantasy Map Exhibition.

More than 400 maps, previously owned by collector Howard I. Golden, have been donated to the National Library of Israel.

The antique maps, dating from 1475 to 1800, were preserved in excellent physical condition by Mr. Golden who, over several decades, collected historical maps of the Land of Israel. A significant percentage of the maps were printed before 1700 and are therefore defined as rare. NLI has cataloged and digitized the maps for preservation and research purposes, to be used as primary sources, downloadable and free-of-charge, for students, researchers, and visitors from Israel and abroad.

The library’s map collection is available online. News coverage from The Times of Israel.

This means that all five volumes that have been published to date can be downloaded for free (here). The remaining volume—volume five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century—is in preparation. When that final book is published, it will close out a project that has taken more than four decades to come to fruition.

Previously: Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

Previously: La Carte de Cassini.

Three books that have come out or are coming out this year that deal with maps of early modern Europe:

Navigations: The Portuguese Discoveries and the Renaissance by Malyn Newitt (Reaktion, 24 Apr). “Navigations re-examines the Portuguese voyages of discovery by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals gave these voyages long-term global significance.” £25/$40. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Here Begins the Dark Sea: Venice, a Medieval Monk, and the Creation of the Most Accurate Map of the World by Meredith F. Small (Pegasus, 6 Jun). A book about the famous Fra Mauro map. “Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith F. Small reveals how Fra Mauro’s mappamundi made cartography into a science rather than a practice based on religion and ancient myths.” $29. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps by Chet Van Duzer (Brill, 25 May ebook, 19 Jul print). I’ve been following Van Duzer’s work on horror vacui, the lack of empty spaces on maps, for some time (1, 2); that work seems to be taken up by at least the first chapter on this new book on cartouches, which is available for free as an open-access download. “This lavishly illustrated book is the first systematic exploration of cartographic cartouches, the decorated frames that surround the title, or other text or imagery, on historic maps. It addresses the history of their development, the sources cartographers used in creating them, and the political, economic, historical, and philosophical messages their symbols convey. Cartouches are the most visually appealing parts of maps, and also spaces where the cartographer uses decoration to express his or her interests—so they are key to interpreting maps. The book discusses thirty-three cartouches in detail, which range from 1569 to 1821, and were chosen for the richness of their imagery.” $144. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

More: Map Books of 2023.

Speaking of georeferencing old maps, the Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library has a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban atlases. Their Atlascope platform presents 101 of them in a web interface overlaid on a modern street map. The Leventhal is now looking to expand Atlascope’s coverage beyond the Boston area to towns and counties across Massachusetts, and is raising funds to do so (it can apparently take 60 hours to process one atlas). Details on sponsoring an atlas here. See their Instagram post.

The blog of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Maps Division isn’t the first place you’d expect an explanation of the GeoTIFF format (basically, an image file in TIFF format that includes georeferencing metadata, so that the image can be projected on a map grid). But georeferencing old maps so that they can be placed on a modern map grid is definitely a thing, and Carissa Pastuch’s piece, “The Secret Life of GeoTIFFs,” looks at GeoTIFFs through the lens of an experimental dataset of georeferenced late 19th- and early 20th-century Austro-Hungarian maps.

Most of their videos are a few years old, but I only recently stumbled across the YouTube channel of New World Maps. They have a number of short, practical videos aimed at map buyers and map owners who want to display their maps: tips for framing maps, for flattening maps so they can be framed (above), for dealing with small chips and tears (at least on inexpensive maps), among other subjects. Useful—and not just for maps.

Alejandro Polanco’s latest Kickstarter, Geography 1880, is in the vein of some of his previous ones: restoring and reprinting works from the late 19th century. This time he’s looking to create an anthology of maps from family and school atlases of the era.

The idea is to give shape to a new atlas that brings together maps forgotten in time that were once enjoyed again and again, by the light of a fire or gas lamps, from the great era of family atlases. To this end, I am undertaking a process of scanning the atlases of the period between 1860 and 1900 that I have in my library. Alongside this material, the book includes maps from various map libraries around the world (from USA, Spain, UK and Germany), with the corresponding attribution. All this forms an atlas full of authentic 19th century works of art that I hope will spark the imagination of my backers just as it was in the 1880s. Alongside the maps and illustrations of the period, my descriptive commentaries include details of the graphic styles, cartographers and geographical curiosities that appear on each page.

Hardcover, softcover and PDF versions will be produced, the hardcover in a 100-copy limited edition that has already been spoken for.

Previously: A Project to Restore a 19th-Century Treatise on Hand-drawn Mapping.

The Ebstorf Map, a 13th-century mappa mundi, was destroyed by bombing during World War II; it survives only as black-and-white photographs and colour facsimiles of the original. Those images were used by the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg to create a digital version in 2008. And now that digital version has been used to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf Map using a video game engine. The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog has the details.

The British Library has collaborated with Escape Studios’ School of Interactive and Real Time to create an interactive version of the Ebstorf map. A team of students and graduates participated in the ‘Escape Pod’ incubator to create a 3D version of the map, using the digital facsimile created by Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.

The interactive map, created in Unreal Engine, has been set in a fictional medieval scriptorium to suggest the tone of the space in which it was created. All aspects of the room were imagined, researched and created by the students at Escape.

The interactive map ties in with the British Library’s ongoing exhibition, Alexander the Great: the Making of a Myth; the map’s 15 clickable points of interest relate to Alexander. Details here.

It sounds like overkill, albeit a fun kind of overkill. It’s a free download, but requires a PC with a graphics card (i.e., no integrated graphics) running Windows 10, so I can’t try it out. But if you can, and want to, you can download it here.