Category: Antique Maps

More on Secret Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Doug Specht has a piece about the British Library’s exhibition Secret Maps in The Conversation. “The exhibition does not shy away from difficult topics. Maps tracing the infrastructure of apartheid, or those produced to facilitate war or surveillance, sit alongside playful artefacts such as the iconic Where’s Wally? books. The effect is to remind us that all mapping, whether for adventure, statecraft, or protest, is fundamentally about control: who gets to see, who gets seen and who decides.”

I’d forgotten that past British Library exhibitions (London: A Life in Maps, Magnificent Maps) generated all kinds of coverage. This might not be the last piece we see on this exhibition.

Previously: New British Library Exhibition: Secret Maps; Secret Maps, the Book.

Ireland: Mapping the Island

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

RTÉ has published an excerpt from Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, the latest book of cartographic histories published by Birlinn (though Birlinn’s website seems to be offline at the moment).

Book cover: Ireland: Mapping the Island

This book – Ireland – Mapping the Island – is a celebration of the maps of Ireland produced over the centuries. We aim to give our readers a sense of the huge variety of maps that have been drawn and of their value as documents. Quite a number of themes run through the book. We look at the importance of boundaries, what maps tell us about the development of towns and settlements, the ways in which maps have been used to create impressions of place, their role in the development of travel and how they facilitated the emergence of the ‘tourist’. We also look at how others saw us and particularly at the maps produced since the 1930s by the military powers of a number of countries. One central focus is on how we learned about the shape and internal geography of Ireland. Before the development of airplanes and spacecraft, people had to take it on trust that we correctly knew the shape of the island of Ireland. That knowledge had been gradually refined for centuries and the state of knowledge was captured in the maps produced in each era.

Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson. Birlinn, 2 Oct 2025 (U.S. 2 Dec 2025), £30/$45. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Secret Maps, the Book

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Both the U.K. and U.S. covers of Secret Maps, a book accompanying a British Library exhibition of the same name.

I didn’t put two and two together. Secret Maps, the British Library exhibition (previously), has an accompanying book, because British Library exhibitions invariably come with books. And that book was already listed on my Map Books of 2025 page: Secret Maps: How they Conceal and Reveal the World by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko, who curated the exhibition, is out now from British Library Publishing; it comes out in the U.S. in a couple of weeks, under the title Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today, from the University of Chicago Press.

Secret Maps by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes and Magdalena Peszko. British Library, 24 Oct 2025, £40. University of Chicago Press, 14 Nov 2025, $39. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

New British Library Exhibition: Secret Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Banner illustration from the British Library’s Secret Maps page.
British Library

A new exhibition opened at the British Library this weekend: Secret Maps.

Maps have always been more than just tools for navigation – in the hand of governments, groups and individuals, maps create and control knowledge. In Secret Maps, we trace the levels of power, coercion and secrecy that lie behind maps from the 14th century to the present day, and uncover the invisible forces that draw and distort the world around us.

Some of the maps on display reveal hidden landscapes, offering insight into places long forgotten or erased from official histories. Others are purposefully deceptive, designed to protect treasures, mask strategic locations, or reshape the way we see the world. This exhibition uncovers each of their individual secrets, revealing their hidden purposes and power.

The exhibition runs until 18 January 2016. Tickets cost £20. There are also a number of talks, tours, workshops and other events affiliated with the exhibition; they’re listed at the bottom of the exhibition’s web page.

Update: There’s also a book.

Update #2: Strike action by British Library workers may affect opening hours. See this page for information.

A Short Course on Maps as Historical Sources

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Historic Maps: Interpreting Stories of Place is a three-day short course on using maps as historical sources is being offered by the Institute of Historical Research in London from January 28 to 30, 2026.

Although maps have long been a part of historical research, they are subjective and should always be analysed in the same way as any other primary source. This dynamic 3-day Historic Maps Discovery Training will include lectures, one-to-one consultations, library tours, visits to our special collections and opportunities to explore our digital resource Layers of London. Together, we will learn about the different types of historic map, from the evolution of cartography to the simple digital tools you can use for comparison and analysis in your own projects. 

It costs £240; no prior expertise or experience required. Via Katie Parker, who’s one of the instructors.

Oculus Mundi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

Two Books Map London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown (Batsford, October 2025) and Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook (Batsford, May 2025).
Batsford

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.

Related: Map Books of 2025.

Reading Historic Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe sculpture by Mark Wallinger, on the campus of the London School of Economics, surrounded by a few passersby with cameras. The globe shows political borders; the South Pole is at the top. Photo by Geoff Henson, used under a Creative Commons licence.
Geoff Henson (Flickr). Creative Commons BY-ND licence.

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The Leardo mappamundi, 1452.

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A portion of the Tabula Peutingeriana focusing on southern Italy, I think.
A portion of 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.