Category: Antique Maps

Two Map Books from the Bodleian

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Images of two books showing their jacket covers: Kris Butler's Drink Maps in Victorian Britain (left) and Debbie Hall's Adventures in Maps (right).

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.

Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Excerpt from an enhanced version of Bartolomeu Velho’s portolan chart of the east coast of North America, ca. 1560. Compare with the original. Library of Congress.

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 Babylonian Map of the World

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

The Useless Grandeur of Coronelli’s Great Globes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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).

A Digital Archive of Ireland’s Ordnance Survey

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A digital archive of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland has been launched, two hundred years after its founding. From the University of Limerick media release:

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, an Atlas of Islands

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Banner image from the Islario Kickstarter, showing a cover of the book plus a background map image.

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.

New Leventhal Exhibition: ‘Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Daqing wannian yitong dili quantu (Suzhou, ca. 1820). Map, Prussian blue ink on xuan paper mounted as folding screen, 112×249 cm. MacLean Collection Map Library, Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center.

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.

A Library of 17th-Century Map Elements, Useful for Fantasy and Game Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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]

Napoleon’s Adriatic Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
From C. F. Beautemps-Beaupré, Reconnoissance hydrographique des ports du Royaume d’Italie situés sur les côtes du Golphe de Venise (1806). NSK.

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).

A Very Personal Map Exhibition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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?”

Globes in the Modern Era

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with built-in GPS, there’s something about a globe—a spherical representation of the world in miniature—that somehow endures.” The Associated Press has a fairly light feature on the relevance and popularity of globes today; the bespoke globes of Bellerby and Co. (whence) are prominently featured, of course (Replogle not so much, oddly), but they’re intermixed with some historical trivia. Not in-depth in the slightest, but something a few newspapers would have found interesting enough to run.

Heart-Shaped Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A Modern and Complete Map of the World by the Royal Mathematician Oronce Fine of the Dauphiné (1534). Library of Congress website.Today might be a good day to look at cordiform map projections—maps in the shape of a heart. This Geography Realm post (and related video) looks at the history of such projections, such as the Werner and Bonne, which first saw use in the 16th and 17th centuries. This Library of Congress blog post explores two maps that use the projection: a 1795 Ottoman Turkish map attributed to a Tunisian cartographer, and the 1534 map by Oronce Finé (pictured) that apparently inspired it.