‘The Most Amazing Map Exhibition Ever Mounted’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Every so often Matthew Edney posts something that had to be cut from his work in progress. In this case it’s a piece about what he calls “the most amazing map exhibition ever mounted”: Cartes et figures de la terre, which ran at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1980.

The curators of Cartes et figures de la terre were not map specialists. The principal curator was Giulio Macchi (1918–2009), an Italian film maker and producer for Italian state television, who was also an experienced curator of art exhibitions. The large accompanying volume, of the same title as the exhibition, was edited by Jean-Loup Rivière (1948–2018), a playwright, director, and theater critic and theorist who was then a research fellow at the Centre Pompidou.

Neither Macchi nor Rivière were committed to established scholarly and professional attitudes towards maps and their history. Entranced by the great variety of scientific and artistic map images, both past and present, they emphasized the aesthetic form of maps rather than map content. In doing so, Macchi and Rivière challenged the seemingly eternal verities of the normative map, even as they remained bound to those verities, not least to the idea that all maps are somehow all the same and a necessarily exceptionalist form of representation. They were especially enamored of the spectacular and of the creative in mapping.

Among other things, they brought the Coronelli globes out of storage.

In conjunction with the exhibition was a short surrealist film about cartography, Le jeu de l’oie (Une fiction didactique à propos de la cartographie), written and directed by Raúl Ruiz for France 2; you can watch it on YouTube (English subtitles are available):

Pinhead Map Icons

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A screenshot from the Pinhead Map Icons page showing every single icon at a very very small size.
Pinhead Map Icons

Quincy Morgan has released Pinhead Map Icons: “So you’re making a map and need some icons. Well, maybe a lot of icons. Like, for anything that might appear on a map. And they need to be visually consistent. Like the size and direction and whatever. And they gotta be free. Even public domain. In vector format. With no AI. Oh, and they all need to be legible on the head of a pin.” 1,045 icons and counting, in SVG format.

The Library of Lost Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: The Library of Lost Maps

When it comes to books that present the maps of a single library or museum—take, for example, Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room, about the Bodleian, or Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library—there seems to be a standard, curatorial template, one that focuses on full-colour reproductions of the maps, each of which is accompanied by a short explanatory text. The maps, as objects, are the point.

The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury, 2025) is about the maps held in the Map Room of University of College London. But author James Cheshire is doing something quite different here. Partly this is because UCL is neither the Bodleian nor the British Library. Their holdings are not remotely similar. There’s no equivalent of the Gough Map or the Selden Map here; the maps are more modern (19th and 20th century) and less rare and singular. UCL’s Map Library was a working map library, used by its staff for teaching and research, rather than something more curatorial.

But what the maps at UCL do have is stories attached—about how they were made, and about how they came to be in UCL’s hands. The Library of Lost Maps is simultaneously a story of the early days of UCL and its role in broadening education in Britain, its role as a repository for so many maps being produced during the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, and its uncertain future as that role of map repository is increasingly seen as obsolete.

Continue reading “The Library of Lost Maps” →

Da Vinci’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An octant map of the world circa 1514, showing the globe in eight pieces, that is increasingly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship of this 1514 octant map of the world has been disputed over the years.

Miguel García Álvarez looks at the maps of Leonardo da Vinci. “Leonardo never wrote a treatise on geography, as Ptolemy did, but his understanding of the territory and the importance of finding effective ways to represent it was far ahead of his contemporaries. I could simply leave you with his collection of maps, and I guarantee you would be fascinated by their beauty. Instead, I am going to limit myself to just three and use them to illustrate how he achieved three crucial advances in the early 16th century that are fundamental to understanding the history of geography.”

See also Christopher Tyler, “Leonardo da Vinci’s World Map,” Cosmos and History 13 (2017).

One-Day Oxford Symposium Explores Digital and Analog Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Maps: Digital | Analogue is a one-day symposium from the Sunderland Collection, held in conjunction with the Bodleian Libraries, taking place on 26 February 2026. “Discover the secrets that digitisation can reveal about historical maps and atlases, explore the world of online gaming maps, learn about globes and conservation, and find out all about the colours and pigments used in early cartography.” Free registration, streamed and in-person at Oxford’s Weston Library.

Previously: Oculi Mundi.

A Zero Declination World Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Bad Map Projection #216: Zero Declination. A world map in cylindrical projection distorted so that up is magnetic north. (Randall Munroe, xkcd, 13 Feb 2026.)
Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Zero Declination,” xkcd, 13 Feb 2026.

The Bad Map Projection series of xkcd cartoons are mischievous and brain-melting but often as not come with a kernel of truth. Last Friday’s is a case of geomagnetorectification, distorting the map to line up true north with magnetic north. Is it wrong that I think it’s more interesting than brain-melting?

Toronto’s New Transit Map, and Its Mapmaker

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

With two new light rail lines opening in Toronto recently, the Toronto Transit Commission has had to update the maps of its subway, light rail and streetcar network, which appear in its stations and vehicles. CBC News has a short piece about the man responsible for updating those maps: the TTC’s mapmaker, Alex Blackwell. (Here’s a link to a PDF version of the map—the squarish version, not the extremely horizontal one on vehicles.)

Warning Signs

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Adam Simmons sees some warning signs for geographers and the geospatial industry after watching the archives of the American Geographical Society’s 2025 Symposium (see the YouTube playlist).

The event, held back in November at Columbia University under the banner Geography 2050: The Future of GeoAI, was meant to be a victory lap. It was billed as the moment the “science of where” finally merged with the “science of artificial intelligence” to save the planet.

But viewing the footage now, in the cold, gray light of early 2026, the recordings feel less like a conference proceeding and more like the flight data recorder of a crash we should have seen coming.

Among other things: a disconnect between industry and academia, the loss of geography departments, and above all, multiple disruptions, threats and harms from AI.

WCVB’s Chronicle Looks at Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Looks like Boston TV channel WCVB’s Chronicle newsmagazine turned its attention to maps last week: there were profiles of Map Center owner Andrew Middleton, cartographer Andy Woodruff and the Leventhal Map Center, plus pieces on brain mapping, forensic mapping and MassGIS. (The clips are also available on the Chronicle YouTube channel.)

The Peoples of North America in 1776

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Peoples of North America in 1776: a map from the Utah Historical Society showing the location of indigenous groups and colonial communities.
Utah Historical Society

Classroom materials and maps produced by the Utah Historical Society for the State of Utah’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States include this rather interesting map of the peoples of North America in 1776. It shows “colonial communities” alongside Indigenous language groups. [John Garrison Marks]

The Cold War Seen Through Polar Projections

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On The Conversation, James Cheshire looks at the Cold War-era maps that news magazines commissioned to explain the geopolitical situation to their readers. “Their maps were large, dramatic and designed to be spread across kitchen tables and classroom desks. And they also offered a very different perspective to the mainstream maps we have become accustomed to today.” Which is to say: polar projections were front and centre.

Le Jour de la Carte

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

More than a hundred map-related events are taking place today (4 February 2026) in France, plus a few elsewhere, as part of the first Jour de la Carte (Day of the Map).

Une centaine d’événements organisés par des acteurs publics, privés, éducatifs, culturels, associatifs, citoyens et citoyennes sont prévus en France et à l’étranger, pour réaffirmer le rôle essentiel de la carte comme outil pour faire démocratie, permettant à chacun de comprendre, de débattre et d’agir sur son territoire.

The organizing body is called La République des Cartes, whose members include cartographers and academics, and the goal is expressly political (in a civil-society sense, one that strikes me as quite French).

La République des cartes est une coalition mue par un objectif : replacer la cartographie au cœur du débat démocratique. L’actualité géopolitique des derniers mois livre de multiples exemples, – tels que le changement d’appellation du Golfe du Mexique ou la situation du Groenland – de l’importance des cartes. Pour se représenter le monde autrement, collectivement, déployer une politique sur les territoires et accompagner la transition environmentale grâce à la carte.

Quotes from the press release. Looks like the goal is to make this an annual event.

Making Mountains on Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Mountains are almost ubiquitous in fantasy maps, and almost always drawn in profile, as a line of hill signs. In a Patreon post, mapmaker John Wyatt Greenlee (aka the Surprised Eel Historian) discusses a couple of ways to draw mountains and mountain ranges in the usual fantasy map style.

See also his post about the mountains in maps he draws for his academic clients, i.e., maps that appear in academic monographs. (“Some academics don’t want mountains. Some want icons. And some want topography. But some brave souls want full-on Tolkienesque mountain ranges.”)