Geographical has an article about Oculus Mundi, the online home of the Sunderland Collection, a private collection of 13th- to 19th-century maps amassed over the years by its eponymous founder, Neil Sunderland, that sat in storage before the decision to digitize it and make it more accessible. I’m glad the article is here to introduce us to the collection, because the Oculus Mundi site is a bit over-designed and can be a challenge to navigate, especially at first. But making private map collections digitally accessible is always a good and laudatory thing, and in this case there’s plenty of good stuff to browse: try starting with this link.
Category: Antique Maps
Two Books Map London
Two books out this year, both from Batsford, explore London through maps. Vincent Westbrook’s Modern London Maps focuses on more than 60 maps from the 20th century. Like many books of this kind, Modern London Maps draws primarily from a single source: the London Archives. Mapping London reviewed it last month: “probably quite close to the book that we would have published.” And out next month, The Boroughs of London collects Mike Hall’s “boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design,” pairing it with commentary by Matt Brown.
- Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook. Batsford, 8 May 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. - The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown. Batsford, 9 Oct 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
Reading Historic Maps
Reading Historic Maps: A Practical Guide “is an educational resource designed to help students and educators better understand historic maps. Focusing on depictions of navigation and conquest in world maps, the guide explains where to find these maps and how to analyze both common and unique cartographic details. The guide also contains suggested further readings and appendixes of additional maps to view.” Created by Kathy Hart, this 12-page PDF document covers the basics of what the details on old maps can tell the reader. [Paige Roberts]
At the Newberry in October
Several things coming up at Chicago’s Newberry Library in October:
An exhibition, Mapping Outside the Lines, runs from 9 October 2025 to 14 February 26 at the Newberry’s Trienens Galleries.
For centuries, mapmakers have experimented with the placement, density, and purpose of lines like these to make maps seem simple and objective. Just follow this line and you’ll have everything you need—or so the map leads you to believe. These lines are never as straightforward as they seem. This exhibition follows lines on maps to their extremes. By exploring how maps use lines to make the world legible, the exhibition will bring you through examples of mapmakers and artists who have created, bent, and broken these linear rules. By following these lines, you will find maps to be more complex and more motley than they ever imagined!
The 22nd annual Nebenzahl Lecture Series, Mapping from Mexico: New Narratives for the History of Cartography, runs from 16 to 18 October 2025.
The 2025 Nebenzahl Lectures continue to promote new thinking in map history by asking how orienting our stories from Mexico, looking out toward the rest of the world, challenges common narratives and popular assumptions in the history of mapmaking. Despite the prominent role mapping in Mexico has played, cartographic histories are often told from a European perspective. But how do the stories we tell, methodological assumptions we make, and categories we define about maps and map history change when we treat sites of production and reception in Mexico—from Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla to the borderlands—with the same specificity map history has given to European centers?
The Newberry is also hosting a rare map and book fair the same weekend to coincide with the Nebenzahl Lectures.
The World Turned Upside Down and Other Globes: A Roundup
Mark Wallinger’s World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe on the LSE campus with the South Pole on top, generated controversy (and vandalism) after its unveiling in 2019 for how it handled contested borders: it shows Lhasa as a capital, Taiwan as a separate country, and omitted Palestine. I mean, it’s on a university campus: controversy about such things was inevitable. Via Mappery; more at Atlas Obscura and Brilliant Maps.
Mappery also points to a 19th-century globular clock that shows the sun’s position at noon on the globe, which I find awfully intriguing, which is to say I want one.
The Library of Congress is changing how it stores its rare globes, replacing acrylic vitrines (heavy, bulky, and potentially off-gassing compounds that put the globes at risk) with archival cardboard cases, which are less sexy but more practical—we’re talking about storage, not display. I’m actually surprised that rare globes had essentially been stored in display cases.
History of Cartography Project’s Fifth Volume Goes to Press
The History of Cartography Project’s fifth and final volume, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, has finally gone to press, though the massive book will take two years to work its way through the production pipeline. It’s scheduled for publication in 2027.
(All previous volumes are available as free downloads in PDF format. So will volume five, once it’s been out for a couple of years.)
Previously: History of Cartography Project’s Fourth Volume Now Available Online; Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Available Online; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Out.
Allmaps Loses Digital Humanities Grant
The Leventhal Center has posted a statement on the future of the Allmaps project—Allmaps is a georeferencing tool for digital images—now that its Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH has been terminated, like so many other NEH grants. “Although we’re disappointed that the U.S. government is backing away from supporting projects like Allmaps, LMEC and AGSL will keep working to support the Allmaps project (and we’re thankful that it has support from European agencies).”
Multispectral Imaging Comes to a 15th-Century Mappamundi
The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee is bringing in the Lazarus Project to carry out multispectral imaging on a 1452 mappamundi by Giovanni Leardo. This is the oldest map in the collection of the American Geographical Society Library, which is housed at UWM. The Lazarus Project is a portable laboratory that brings multispectral imaging to the artifact, rather than the other way around (artifacts being fragile and all, and the Leardo mappamundi is no exception).
“It’s fascinating to watch for the first 10 minutes,” [Lazarus Project board member Chet] Van Duzer said. “After that, it’s like watching paint dry.” The map will be scanned with at least a dozen frequencies of light, and probably more, ranging from infrared through visible light up to ultraviolet. But in the months after taking the original images, “the real magic is in processing,” Van Duzer said. Different combinations of images at different strengths may reveal faded writing that used various pigments of ink.
Previously: Multispectral Analysis Reveals Lost Details on a 16th-Century Portolan Chart.
New Research on the Tabula Peutingeriana
A conference next month on current research on the Tabula Peutingeriana, a 13th-century copy of what is supposed to be a 4th- or 5th-century diagram of the Roman road network. That research includes UV imaging to draw out inscriptions that may have faded over the centuries (another example) and linguistic analyses to determine the provenance of the inscriptions (are they copied from the original or contemporary to the copy)? Page in German, conference in Germany.
Turkish Museum of Cartography
Turkey—or Türkiye, as Erdoğan wants us to call it—has a Museum of Cartography, located in a military district in Ankara. Türkiye Today has a short profile. It seems … modest, all things considered.
A Book on Terrae Incognitae
Carla Lois’s Terrae Incognitae: Mapping the Unknown (Brill, Dec 2024) sounds interesting: it’s a look at the concept of terra incognita—the unknown land on the map—and the different forms it can take. An English translation of a book that first appeared in 2018 in Argentina. [Matthew Edney]
Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There
Almost missed this. Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There is an exhibition in the corridor gallery of Harvard’s Pusey Library that runs until 31 January 2025. It’s about getting from point A to point B over the centuries, and that hasn’t always meant using a map with a grid system. For more, see the Harvard Gazette’s interview with the exhibit’s curator, Molly Taylor-Poleskey.
Naming the Gulf
It’s been a grand total of one day since Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Secretary of the Interior to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Or, to be more precise,
within 30 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of the Interior shall, consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, take all appropriate actions to rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico. The Secretary shall subsequently update the GNIS to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS, consistent with applicable law. The Board shall provide guidance to ensure all federal references to the Gulf of America, including on agency maps, contracts, and other documents and communications shall reflect its renaming.
Despite the timetable of Trump’s order, and the fact that his pick for interior secretary hasn’t as of this writing even been confirmed yet (in the meantime, presumably the order falls uncomfortably in the lap of the acting secretary, a career official), Trump’s followers are already after people to adopt the name change right now, dammit. A Republican congressman is after Apple about their maps, and the Gulf of Mexico Wikipedia article’s talk page has exploded as users come in demanding the name change. And even after the GNIS changes the name—and to be clear, what we’re talking about is the name of the portion of the Gulf of Mexico found in U.S. territorial waters, because a country can’t unilaterally change the name of an international body of water—you can’t force anyone to use that name: not other countries, not private companies, and certainly not individuals.
But oh, you can take note of who refuses to do so. “Gulf of America” is basically a loyalty test—a MAGA shibboleth.
Whatever your take on Trump’s rhetoric about the Gulf of Mexico being an integral part of the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico’s name predates that status, and not by not a little bit. The United States did not reach the Gulf of Mexico until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which gave it New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi, and the Spanish Cession of 1819, which gave it Florida and the Gulf Coast east of Texas. How much before that did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? Let’s find some answers by looking at old maps.
The Palazzo Vecchio’s Map Room, Restored and Virtual
Restoration work has been completed on the Palazzo Vecchio’s Map Room (no relation); see this Popular Archaeology article for details and photos. In tandem with the restoration, there is now a virtual version of the Map Room that allows you to explore the maps in a virtual facsimile of the room. The maps can also be superimposed on the globe. If this is all a bit too virtual, there’s also an index.
Book Roundup: December 2024
A lack of time and energy have conspired to prevent me from serving up a gift guide this year, but I can point you to a few links related to books that have come out this year.
First up, I have in my hands a review copy of the seventh volume of the Atlas of Design. It is the usual collection of marvellous cartography from familiar and unfamiliar mapmakers, some of which quite unexpected, and I hope to have more to say about it shortly. It made its debut at the NACIS annual meeting in October and is available to purchase from this page. See my review of the sixth volume.
Matthew Edney’s list of map history books published or seen in 2024 is now live; he’s been posting such a list each year since 2017 (previously).
40 Maps, 47 Borders, 50 Transit Maps
Alaistair Bonnett’s latest, 40 Maps That Will Change How You See the World came out in September from Ivy Press. Geographical magazine published an interview with him in October. I’ve reviewed two of Bonnett’s books here before—Off the Map (Unruly Places) and The Age of Islands (Elsewhere)—which were more about geographical curiosities than maps per se. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
To promote A History of the World in 47 Borders (Wildfire, April)—published in the U.S. as A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders (The Experiment, October)—Jonn Elledge has posted a list of the 47 facts about the 47 borders that are the focus of the book’s 47 chapters. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Mark Ovenden’s latest, Iconic Transit Maps (Prestel, 2024) is a look at transit map design via fifty examples around the world. Cameron Booth reviews it on his Transit Maps blog. Way back in 2008, I reviewed the first edition of his Transit Maps of the World. Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
Related: Map Books of 2024.