The Map Room

The Vacationeers take Google Maps Street View a little too far:

Via Valleywag.

Previously: Real-Time Satellite Imagery: EarthNow vs. The Simpsons; The Truth About Google Earth.

On MapHist, Tony Campbell has announced a major new section of his Map History/History of Cartography site: Cartographic Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles Likely to Deceive. It includes a list of known fakes (unfortunately in Word format), a guide to how to tell a fake or forged map, and notes on known or suspected forgeries. Though not the resource Tony originally envisioned more than two years ago, it still looks impressive, interesting and useful.

Visitors to The Map Room may have noticed some screwy things going on today. I got it into my head to redesign this site, live. (No safe, out-of-the-way test sites for me, no sir.) The bulk of the work is now done, but there are still a few things to finish (such as a new contact page), and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it for a while until I’m satisfied. I also still have to see whether there are any problems in Internet Explorer, which I don’t have access to here in my PC-free home; I’m sure there will be, and I’ll check that tomorrow. (I have tested this design in Firefox and Safari, either of which is preferable to IE and both of which display lots of rounded corners, which IE doesn’t support.)

Seymour I. Schwartz, author of five books on the history of cartography,* is pledging his collection to the University of Virginia, which, in turn, is naming its map room in his honour today. About 50 of those 225 maps go on display on Monday; the exhibition will run through January 17, 2009. From the press release (which also has samples of the collection): “Included are one of the oldest maps to show the western hemisphere (1508), the first map to show Florida (Hernando Cortés’s 1524 map of Mexico City), and an 18th century map of the Ohio River Valley drawn by then-unknown surveyor George Washington.” Via MapHist and Map History/History of Cartography.

* Those books being Putting “America” on the Map: The Story of the Most Important Graphic Document in the History of the United States (2007), about the Waldseemüller map; The Mismapping of America (2003), which sounds interesting; The Mapping of America (2001), with Ralph Ehrenberg; This Land is Your Land: The Geographic Evolution of the United States (2000); and The French and Indian War 1754-1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America (2000).

At the Boston Public Library’s Copley Square through June, Boston and Beyond, a collection of bird’s-eye-view maps of Boston and New England from the second half of the 19th century.

At Harvard University’s Pusey Library until April 1, Henry F. Walling and the Elevation of American Mapmaking. Walling (1825-1888) “was responsible for at least 117 large-scale maps of American towns and counties, nearly 20 state maps and atlases, substantial contributions to the work of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey, and important academic publications.” Also at the Pusey Library: Ukraine under Western Eyes: European Maps of Ukraine from the Renaissance to the 20th Century through May 5; The Lands of the Sophi: Iran in Early Modern European Maps (1550-1700) until August 23; and a permanent display of two Mercator globes. And at the Cabot Science Library until May 23, From Soundings to Sidescan Sonar: Mapping the Ocean Floor.

All free admission. As if Chicago should have all the fun. Via MAPS-L.

John Bartholomew — who, along with his two brothers, was “the last generation of the Edinburgh cartographic family to run the business of John Bartholomew & Son Ltd.” — has died aged 85, the Edinburgh Evening News reports. The Edinburgh-based family firm was first founded in 1826, according to the Wikipedia entry; it merged with Collins in 1989. Among its products was an atlas produced for The Times: the descendant of the 1922 Times Survey Atlas of the World is still being published today.

Pattern Recognition is an exhibition of the work of Jeff Schmuki — “featuring sculptural ceramic works and installations that explore the relationship between cartography, documentary, memory and the natural/manmade landscape” — at the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at De Pauw University from January 30 to March 2, 2008. “Jeff Schmuki’s work creates representations of the land, but goes beyond the flat surface into a realm beyond the common. … Schmuki produces simple and repetitive geometric forms in order to construct his ceramic sculptures and installations. His work is strongly reminiscent of forms and patterns found in the natural landscape, and with titles such as Plats and Elevations, the essence of cartography is examined within Schmuki’s work as well.”

Via Spatial Law, an interesting question about GPS navigation and legal liability: if somebody who follows faulty directions from a GPS navigation system gets into an accident, and is held liable for that accident (as has in fact occurred), can that driver then turn around and sue the GPS company? Are Garmin and TomTom, for example, liable for any errors in their devices’ directions?

Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on the digital map “duopoly,” Navteq and Tele Atlas — it starts and finishes like so many local profiles of digital map surveying, but the meat of the article is a look at the digital mapping business, including the question of whether, in the context of the two companies’ buyouts, owning the map data is essential (overstated), whether the duopoly will abuse their position (unlikely), and whether the companies were overvalued at their purchase (almost certainly). (The article has been republished widely; Google Alerts gave me the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.)

The West Texas Geological Society is running a project to put a large geologic map of the United States into every elementary school in Midland and Odessa, Texas — a project apparently based on another in Corpus Christi. Via All Points Blog.

Ouch: Riding While White on the NYC Subway, an MTA subway map with minority-neighbourhood stops removed. “This map, though intended for white folks, can be used by people of color who live in the unmarked areas because the last stops on these lines should be where white people exit and seats are available for you to sit down. If they don’t get off, maybe you should remind them that they missed their last stop.” Via Andrew Sullivan.

Longitude
by Dava Sobel
Walker and Company, 1995, 2007. Paperback, xiv + 184 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-8027-1529-6

Latitude and longitude are basics of accurate map-making and navigation. In an age of pervasive GPS signals, it’s easy to forget that determining your location was not at all straightforward until relatively recently. Calculating latitude has always been simpler than calculating longitude. Latitude can be determined observationally: by measuring the angle of Polaris above the horizon, or the altitude of the sun, moon or other celestial objects on known dates.

In the 18th century, an accurate method of determining longitude was a matter of some urgency. In Britain, a Board of Longitude was convened and a £20,000 prize announced for such a method. There were many crackpot ideas, but it was believed that astronomical observation could also be used to determine longitude, but at the time, the state of astronomical knowledge was not yet at a point where this could be done. Astronomers simply did not yet have accurate measurements of the stars.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. While astronomers populated the Board of Longitude and looked for an astronomical solution, English clockmaker John Harrison worked on an alternative solution: a clock. The Earth rotates through 360 degrees in 24 hours — 15 degrees an hour, or a degree every four minutes. Longitude could be calculated from the difference between local noon (which could be observed) and noon at a known point: if noon came an hour earlier than it did at that known point, you were 15 degrees west of it.

But, as the state of astronomical knowledge was insufficient to the task, so too was the state of clock technology. While astronomers conducted their observations and compiled their tables, Harrison spent decades working on a series of timepieces that could handle the vicissitudes of sea travel and could continue to tick even while being wound. Two competing methods came to fruition at roughly the same time: Harrison’s timepiece, which was accurate, easy to use, but expensive; and astronomer royal Nevil Maskelyne’s lunar tables, which were complicated to use but inexpensive to reproduce. Intrigue ensued. Eventually, other clockmakers were able to reduce the cost of manufacturing chronometers — as they became known — to the point where they were in regular use in British ships by the early 19th century.

This, in a nutshell, is the story told in Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a fascinating look not only at a man and his timepieces, but also at an age where necessity truly was the mother of invention. Longitude was first published in 1995, became a bestseller, and spawned a TV movie in 2000 (which I haven’t seen). It’s a phenomenon, and rightly so. This little book is absolutely engaging; those with an interest in the history of navigation, cartography, astronomy and, yes, clockmaking will find something to enjoy. My readers told me a year ago to read this book, and boy were they right. Highly recommended.

(See also the History of longitude Wikipedia entry.)

• Buy Longitude at Amazon.com
• Buy Longitude (audio CD) at Amazon.com
• Buy Longitude (DVD) at Amazon.com

The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Gloucestershire is on display at Oxford’s Bodleian Library until February 23; the Library acquired the 16th-century tapestry at auction last year for more than £100,000. “The wool and silk tapestry … is part of a set of four maps commissioned by Ralph Sheldon for his home at Weston, Warwickshire. … Illustrating the Midlands counties of England, the series features Worcestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. The Bodleian’s new acquisition now rejoins the maps for Worcestershire and Oxfordshire, which were given to the library in 1809.” (Update: OULS announcement.)

I still find the Google Sky interface less appealing than some dedicated planetarium software I’ve tried, but I’m still interested in the most recent updates, including, among other things, imagery from space-based telescopes and imagery layers from 17th-century celestial maps. (Were these orthorectified? The Cassini overlay is surprisingly close; since it was apparently originally a globe, it’s also inverted.) See also Google Earth Blog and Using Google Earth.

Note also that, as of last month, the Google Maps API now supports map tiles for the Moon, Mars and the night sky. Astronomy web sites might be able to do something with that, I think.

Previously: Sky in Google Earth.

Catholicgauze points out that some content from The Onion’s Our Dumb World (reviewed here) is being put online, a bit more each week, both as a Google Maps mashup and a Google Earth layer; brief bullet-point-sized excerpts in each case.

Previously: Review: Our Dumb World; Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas.

The New York Post has an item on the Map Room (no relation) of the Borough of Manhattan’s Topographic Bureau, which is responsible for the official maps of New York County (largely defunct and contiguous with Manhattan) since 1748; last week a call was put out for help in preserving roughly 800 of the 4,000 maps — they’re starting to crumble. Via Map History/History of Cartography.

The Wall Street Journal reviews two exhibits from Chicago’s Festival of Maps: the flagship Field Museum exhibit (of course), along with one of two exhibits at the Newberry Library, Ptolemy’s Geography and Renaissance Mapmakers. (Actually, the Newberry claims three exhibits, since Newberry historians curated the Field Museum exhibit.) The remaining Newberry exhibit is Mapping Manifest Destiny: Chicago and the American West; Doug Knox writes to report that a full-colour catalogue of the exhibit is available from the library’s bookstore.

Which Waldseemüller map is “America’s birth certificate” (i.e., the first map to label the New World as “America”)? Is it the one the last copy of which is now on display at the Library of Congress? Or, as the Providence Journal suggests (mirror), is it another Waldseemüller map acquired by Brown University in 1901, which may or may not have been published before the Library of Congress’s map? And Tony Campbell writes on MapHist, “Just to help this along, it is worth reminding the participants about the globe gores in Minnesota’s James Ford Bell Library, included in their exhibition last October, entitled ‘The Map that Named America, 1507-2007.’ That is not mentioned in the current article.” (More on the Bell Library’s gores.)

Previously: Upcoming Books on Waldseemüller.

Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth
by The Onion
Little, Brown, 2007. Hardcover, 245 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-316-08142-5

As I mentioned before, Our Dumb World is The Onion’s take on the sort of atlas exemplified by the old National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our World, a book I grew up on and that did a lot to shape my perception of the world. Our Dumb World takes the same format: each country gets a map, a flag, an introduction and a list of geographical factoids.

This is an Onion book, so the similarities end there. In a nutshell, Our Dumb World takes the piss out of the planet, simultaneously riffing on the foibles of the nations of the world and on our stereotyped, blinkered perceptions of them. It relies to a certain extent on our perceptions of other countries: there are lots of jokes to be had at Brazil’s expense, so its entry is richer, longer and funnier than, say, Belgium’s, which is a one-note chocolate joke. (Incidentally, this means that Our Dumb World won’t translate well: Belgians are the butt of French jokes the way that Newfoundlanders are the butt of Canadian jokes — or, well, see Poland. Humour is local.) It also means that many countries get short shrift (such as most of Africa), and, at least in San Marino’s case, the writers seem to have given up altogether. (A few island nations are missing, but to be fair, how many jokes can be made about Nauru or Kiribati? Not that they’ll be around much longer anyway …)

That it’s an Onion book also means that each square inch of each page has value. If you’ve read their faux 20th-century retrospective, Our Dumb Century, even the bus-plunge two-liners had comedic value. So it is here, with each point on the map, each thumbnail photo and each entry on the history timeline played for keeps, if not always successfully for laughs. And that it’s an Onion book means that the sense of humour can at times draw blood — see, for example, Thailand’s entry. This is humour that makes you flinch. Now, I adore bad taste, but it’s worth mentioning that this book isn’t for everyone — especially not for children.

Don’t look for cartographic accuracy in this book — I shouldn’t need to mention that. We’re doing well when a country’s capital is placed within a thousand miles of its location. But cartophiles will enjoy at least one good laugh in Greenland’s entry: “As anyone who has seen a world map in the last 50 years knows, Greenland is larger than Africa and South America combined.” Somewhere in the underworld, the shade of Arno Peters just giggled.

There’s an audio version available; I don’t know how that works.

Previously: Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas.

• Buy Our Dumb World at Amazon.com
• Buy Our Dumb World (audiobook) at Amazon.com

The editors of An Atlas of Radical Cartography wrote in to promote their book. “An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. It pairs artists, architects, and designers with writers to address the role of the map as a political agent. [It] makes an important contribution to a growing cultural movement that traverses the boundaries between art, cartography, geography and activism.” Physically, it’s an unusual product: 10 essays in the book, accompanied by 10 fold-out maps, all slipcased. Excerpts are available on their website, which should give you a sense of what they’re on about. An Atlas is also a travelling exhibition that is fortuitously in Chicago at the moment.

Update, Jan. 20: Catholicgauze reviews the book but does not share its politics: “The politics of the atlas are clearly leftist. … Those who favor Catholicgauze for President best stay away to avoid leftism combined with academic jargon. On the other hand, if post-Fordism and Hugo Chavez inhabit your dream world then there is something here for you to enjoy.”

• Buy An Atlas of Radical Cartography at Amazon.com

At the Philadelphia Museum of Art until April 6, an exhibition of tapestries by the major South African artist, William Kentridge. The Porter tapestries “stem from a series of drawings in which he conjured shadowy figures from ripped construction paper and collaged them onto the web-like background of nineteenth-century atlas maps.” The Philadelphia Inquirer has more; the reviewer explores why they were done as tapestries, with the final products woven from mohair by weavers at the Stephens Tapestry Studio. A book is also available.

• Buy William Kentridge: Tapestries at Amazon.com

On the Garmin blog, Chet tantalizes us with coy references to Mac-compatible hardware and software, especially a software product code-named “Bobcat,” to be announced this week at Macworld (Gizmodo).

Garmin’s been behind on its now two-year-old promise to provide Mac compatibility to current hardware, but it seems that some things have been happening on that front while I was busy these past few months: from this tip at Mac OS X Hints, I learn that the POI Loader for Mac is no longer in beta and that Mac versions of MapInstall and MacManager are now available.

It wasn’t so long ago that our world maps had parts that were either left empty or left to conjecture. “Here be dragons.” We haven’t had to worry about unmapped, unknown parts of the Earth — terra incognita — for a while, but this isn’t true for the rest of the solar system. Other worlds are still in the process of being mapped. We have to wait until 2015 for dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto to receive their first visits from space probes, but even places we’ve already sent probes to have not yet been completely mapped.

Take Titan, for example — Saturn’s largest moon. Discovered in 1655, it was first visited by Voyager 1 in 1980, but its dense, smog-like atmosphere prevented a clear view of the surface. That had to wait for the Cassini-Huygens mission, which arrived at Saturn in 2004. The Huygens lander sent back images, but since then the Cassini probe has been making passes of the moon, using filtered imagery and radar to map the planet, which is now revealed as an ice world with liquid hydrocarbon lakes. NASA has maps of Titan (as of December 2006) with and without labels, as well as more recent radar images of the northern and southern polar regions.

Mercury’s situation is even more unusual: it was visited by the Mariner 10 probe in 1974 and 1975, but its passes by the innermost planet only allowed half of its surface to be imaged. The MESSENGER probe, which makes its first pass of Mercury tomorrow, will rectify that: after three flybys, it will eventually orbit the planet in 2011. The Planetary Society explains the mission and includes an equatorial map of the planet — well, half of it.

The Springfield Republican reports on a GIS project conducted by students of Turners Falls High School, which is part of ESRI’s U.S. Community Atlas program. The students produced a number of maps of the towns of Gill, Montague and Erving, Massachusetts. From The Republican: “They had mapped and described numerous aspects of their community including population density, geologic features, environmental challenges, population density, scenic views, recreational opportunities, governmental services and shopping and dining options.” ESRI’s page links to many other such projects. Via Geography Matters.

Maps of Vienna from the city’s government. The city’s architectural, archeological, artistic and cultural history is presented through a map-based interface (which unfortunately does not work in Safari). Clicking on points of interest brings up incredibly detailed information: the map is a front-end to a massive cadastral database. The city also has a collection of maps of the city dating from 1547 to 1830. Via MapHist.

An unusual book forthcoming from Hes & de Graaf: Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons: The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Title-Page. “Over the time period covered by the present publication — roughly from the 1470s to the 1870s — very many printed books opened with an attractive decorative title page or frontispiece; sometimes both. In this book a limited selection has been made from the extremely wide field of known title pages, mainly by a focus on subject matter which is primarily cartography, geography, history and topography, together with associated disciplines such as astronomy, travel and exploration.” (Maps and More)

Vincent Virga’s Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations draws from the Library of Congress’s map collection. CSPAN’s BookTV has video about the book, but it’s in Real format. (Map the Universe)

Every publisher of a full-size comprehensive atlas also has a concise, compact version, for those of us who can’t afford the larger atlas’s price tag or concomitant hernia. Last month the National Geographic blog announced the concise version of its atlas, which came out in November.

The University of Chicago Press’s spring catalogue includes the following provocative titles: The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World by Denis Wood and John Fels (about the subjectivity of maps of the natural world); Coast Lines: How Mapmakes Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change by Mark Monmonier (who would have thought that mapping shorelines could be so contentious?); Bill Hubbard’s American Boundaries: The Nation, the States, the Rectangular Survey; and Alfred Hiatt’s Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes Before 1600.

Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps “illustrates the history of the Lone Star State through color plates of sixty-four historic Texas maps from the Marty and Yana Davis Map Collection in Alpine,” says the Mexia Daily News. The book “is to be used as a catalog which will accompany the collection as it is exhibited in ten museums throughout the Southwest over a period of two years.”

Finally, I’m late in mentioning this New York Times article, which briefly mentions a total of nine recent books about maps.

• Buy Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations at Amazon.com
• Buy National Geographic Concise Atlas of the World, Second Edition at Amazon.com
• Buy The Natures of Maps at Amazon.com
• Buy Coast Lines at Amazon.com
• Buy American Boundaries at Amazon.com
• Buy Terra Incognita at Amazon.com
• Buy Going to Texas at Amazon.com

At the Victoria and Albert Museum until April 27, Mapping the Imagination “includes maps made to inform or to entertain, maps enhanced by imaginative embellishments, maps that show imaginary places, and works in which artists have adapted map iconography to express their ideas and experiences of place.” Not much more information than that. Via Cartophilia.

You Are Here, Hon is a new map blog by someone going by the name of Her Majesty of Maps. With names like that, this could turn out to be interesting.

This collection of blank and outline maps looks useful: the maps are available in GIF, EPS and PDF format, and they’re freely available under a Creative Commons licence. And there seem to be an awful lot of them. Via Maps and More.

Previously: Outline Maps.

Mark Webber’s art includes city maps built from tyographical fragments, arranged in ways that both shape and label the map. At right, Amsterdam; he’s also done New York and London. Thanks to John Deen for the link.

The art of Nancy Goodman Lawrence uses the stuff of maps in collages: “Maps are a huge resource for my work, less for their literal representations than the endless possibilities they offer in rendering the geography of the human body and the space it occupies. Mountains, oceans and roads become veins, tree branches, rug patterns and clothing, as I surgically manipulate them, bit by bit, from one context to another. I find myself minimizing or beating back the most obvious map references to specific locations, but they have a way of bubbling up in ironic ways.”

Today’s edition of the Washington Post reviews the Festival of Maps in Chicago, and in the process mentions that the vaunted Field Museum exhibit will be on display in a Baltimore museum come March. Hold the phone: this sucker’s going on tour?

Previous entries about the Festival of Maps: CSM on the Festival of Maps, Map Art and Books; Festival of Maps Reviews; Festival of Maps: Field Museum Roundup; Festival of Maps: Field Museum Exhibit Virtual Gallery; Festival of Maps Update: Book, KML; Festival of Maps Now Open; Major Field Museum Exhibit Announced (Again); Chicago’s Festival of Maps.

• Buy Maps: Finding Our Place in the World at Amazon.com

Houbart’s Hope, an exhibition by the Vancouver-based Landon Mackenzie, opens this Thursday at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery in Montreal. “In Houbart’s Hope Mackenzie combines her interests in landscape, cartography and neuroscience. Although abstract in appearance, vestiges of historical maps and the process of cartography remain. Using unusual methods, she plays with the immense canvases (7’6” × 10’3”) as a platform for her intuition and her ideas, deliberately constructing parallels of exploration. She considers both her archival research and her picture-making as a treasure hunt, a fairy tale and a way of synthesizing her rich intellectual and intuitive traits.” The Montreal Gazette has an interview. The exhibition runs until February 9.

New work by Francesca Berrini (see previous entry) is on display at the Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco, SF Station reports: “Part designer, part surrealist cartographer, Portland-based Francesca Berrini creates fantastical geographies from maps that have been cut apart and re-arranged. This comes as a more specific manifestation of what she’s known for: exploring strange combinations of found materials. But her works are not overtly popish, not purely found and presented, more thoroughly scrambled and recast. This is perhaps because Berrini arrives where she does as an artist via an unconventional course, at least as compared to other more ambitiously Warholian artists.”

The greater Toronto area’s multicultural nature is vividly brought out by the Toronto Star’s extraordinary “language quilt” map (19.5 MB PDF), which shows the most dominant second language in a given census tract. (In 95 percent of the cases, English is in the majority.) It’s fascinating to see where various communities have settled themselves (Punjabi in Brampton, Italian in Woodbridge, Chinese in Markham). Eight languages also get choropleth maps showing their distribution across the area. Via Accordion Guy and Infonaut.

There are many ways to map the results of the 2008 Democratic and Republican Iowa caucuses. Google’s map shows county outlines colour-coded to indicate the winning candidate, but does not show detailed results. Politico’s interactive map gives you county-by-county results as you hover your cursor over the map, but lacks the instant usefulness of a good choropleth map. And while the choropleth is among the best ways of doing a map of election results, when you have a dozen or so candidates you end up having to do a lot of maps. The Des Moines Register’s election results page allows you to toggle between the various maps at a click; one drawback is that the maps show a candidate’s place (e.g., 1st, 2nd), rather than raw votes or percentages.

Via Google LatLong, The Electoral Map, and Catholicgauze.

Previously in 2004: Iowa Caucuses.

Vector One asks why so many paper map products are still produced:

Paper maps are still produced for a number of reasons. The primary reason that this is the case is due to the fact that paper maps are associated with user needs. While communication purposes are high on the list, the production of a paper map relates to the understanding that the user does not have the tools or software to see a digital map, lives in a place where a digital map cannot be delivered, ease of use and sometimes lower total cost of ownership, and appreciation of the craft of map making. Most of these issues are practical in nature. […]

We have not placed enough effort into understanding why hard copy maps are of value, particularly from a cultural and historical perspective, and how we can go about shifting that value into a fully digital framework — not just technically. This is a major impediment toward moving into an all-digital map environment.

Jeff is dead-on when he argues that many in the field have failed to understand why paper maps continue to have value. But I question the assumption that an all-digital environment is, in fact, desirable from an end-user perspective. Sometimes the best technology for a task is an old one.

Last week, the National Post website ran a three-part excerpt of Graham Robb’s new book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. Of interest to us is the second part, an amusing recounting of the state of mapmaking and surveying of France during Napoleon’s empire:

Napoleon was well aware that the land would not conveniently pose while cartographers mapped it. The famous topographical map produced by César-François Cassini de Thury (now known as Cassini III) decades earlier may not have shown detail on the same scale as the maps of cadastral surveys, which established property lines and tax liability, but a complete map was better than a patchwork of minutely embroidered squares and empty spaces. Napoleon wrote to General Louis Alexandre Berthier on 26 October 1804:

“The ingénieurs-géographes are being asked to make cadastres instead of military maps, which means that, 20 years from now, we shall have nothing … If we had stuck to making maps on Cassini’s scale, we should already have the whole Rhine frontier … Experience shows that the biggest mistake in general administration is trying to do too much. The result is that one lacks the essential.”

• Buy The Discovery of France at Amazon.com

Melissa writes, “Since you bring it up, here’s an update on the Challenger Map” — which, you will recall, has been in storage since 1997. From yesterday’s Vancouver Sun:

Now efforts are about to begin to restore the 196-piece wooden map to its former glory in hopes it can become the “masterpiece” of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

“What we’re doing is repainting it and taking it into the 21st century with special effects,” said Alan Clapp, best known for helping in the development of Granville Island.

Special effects? It’s made of wood.

The large, 12×22-metre Living Map, a showpiece of the apparently defunct “B.C. Experience” exhibition in Victoria, British Columbia, is being moved to an agriculturally themed tourist attraction in nearby Saanich. (This map should not be confused with the older and larger Challenger Map; B.C. does seem to specialize in large maps of itself that end up needing new homes.) Via Anything Geospatial.

Previously: The Living Map.

The Library of Congress exhibit, Exploring the Early Americas, featuring the last surviving copy of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, was reviewed by the Washington Post last week.

Previously: Waldseemüller Map Exhibit Opens Thursday.

The denouement of the Forbes Smiley affair, at least as far as the Boston Public Library is concerned, is covered in today’s Boston Globe: “More than 30 rare, antique maps stolen from the Boston Public Library by a Martha’s Vineyard map dealer were returned to the library in 2007, library president Bernard Margolis said this week, part of the conclusion of an international scandal that rocked the staid world of map collecting.” Smiley returned 31 maps and paid $7,000 in restitution for another map that could not be recovered; three other maps he took have not been located, and more than 30 additional maps, not linked to Smiley, remain missing. The article also addresses the Harvard thefts. Via MapHist.

(For more on the Smiley affair, see the many, many entries in the Map Thefts category. For more on the BPL map thefts, see these previous entries: BPL’s List of Missing Maps; Forbes Smiley Case: 10 Maps Missing at Boston Library.)