A seventeenth-century map of Falmouth, Cornwall lost for more than a century has turned up in the private collection of a local historian who died last June. Created by George Withiell in 1690, the map, titled A True Map of all Sir Peter Killigrew’s Lands in the Parish of Mylor and part of Budock Lands, was last on public display in the 1880s and had gone missing since then. The historian, Alan Pearson, found it for sale in Bristol 10 years ago. The map is now on display at the Cornwall Record Office in Bristol. BBC News, West Briton. [via/via]
Category: Antique Maps
‘We Are One’ in Colonial Williamsburg
We Are One: Mapping America’s Road from Revolution to Independence, an exhibition by the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center (it ran from May to November last year) is going on tour. First stop: Colonial Williamsburg. From March 2016 to January 2017 it will appear at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. From the press release: “More than 30 unique objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collections will be included in the exhibition, which were not shown when it initially opened at the Boston Public Library in May 2015. […] Many of the objects from Colonial Williamsburg’s collection to be seen in We Are One are on view for the first time or are rarely exhibited.” [via]
Previously: Mapping the American Revolution.
Books About the Tabula Peutingeriana
I’ve blogged about the Tabula Peutingeriana before. It was a medieval copy of a fourth- or fifth-century map of the Roman road network. Combined, its 11 sheets form a scroll 6.82 metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, with territories elongated beyond modern recognition; it was basically the classical period’s equivalent of a TripTik or Beck network map. The sole remaining copy is held by the National Library of Austria: it’s too fragile to put on display, though an exception was made for a single day in 2007.
Anyway. During my online meanderings today I stumbled across two academic books about the Tabula that I was previously unaware of: The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire by Emily Albu (2014) and Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (2010). Both from Cambridge University Press, neither cheap.
Buy The Medieval Peutinger Map at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Buy Rome’s World at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
The Selden Map
The Nation has a long article by Paula Findlen on the Selden Map, a Chinese watercolour map acquired by the 17th-century jurist and scholar John Selden and bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in 1659. Findlen recounts the origins of the map and its rediscovery in the Bodleian’s vaults in 2008, and describes it in intricate detail. [via]
The map’s rediscovery has set off a flurry of interest and publications (see book list below). Findlen also looks at the scholarly debates about the map. Brook and Batchelor have both written books about the Selden map, and each scholar takes a somewhat different approach to framing the story and to interpreting a reconstruction of the document’s origins. Yet they concur that this is a Chinese maritime map and a product of late-Ming ambitions, enterprise, and mobility,” she writes.
The Bodleian has a website dedicated to the Selden Map, which includes an online viewer (Flash required). See also Robert Batchelor’s page.
Books About the Selden Map:
- London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689 by Robert K. Batchelor (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks
- Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury [U.S.], House of Anansi [Canada], Profile [U.K.], 2013).
Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks (Canada, U.K.)
- The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty by Hongping Annie Nie (Bodleian Libraries, 2014).
Available as a PDF in English and Chinese.
Previously: More Map Books; Two More Map Books.
Early Maps of London
Google Maps Mania has a post on the earliest maps of London. First, the Copperplate Map (ca. 1550s) of which no prints survive: only three copper printing plates, out of 15, are known to exist, two of which are held by the Museum of London. On the other hand, the Agas Map (above), which appears to be a close copy of the Copperplate, is available in an online interactive version.
Made in Algeria: An Exhibition of Colonial Cartography
Opening today at the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France, and running until May 2nd, Made in Algeria: Généalogie d’un territoire is an exhibition of nearly 200 “maps, drawings, paintings, photographs, films and historical documents as well as works by contemporary artists who surveyed the territory of Algeria.” The exhibition examines not only the cartography of the French colonial period, but the political and cultural narratives—to say nothing of the territory itself—created by colonial mapmaking. Lots of material on the exhibition’s website, but it’s French-only. [via]
Rare Atlas Identified via Reddit
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NPR and the Washington Post report a fascinating story of how a rare atlas was identified in an unlikely fashion: being posted to Reddit. Last month, reference librarian Anders Kvernberg stumbled across an uncatalogued atlas in the vaults of the National Library of Norway. He could make out that it was an Ottoman atlas from 1803, but not much more than that, since he couldn’t read Ottoman Turkish. He did scan and post one of its maps to Reddit, where Redditors went to work translating the text. Then, a couple of weeks later, another Redditor posted an Ottoman map of Africa, which was identified as part of the Cedid Atlas (Cedid Atlas Tercümesi), published in Istanbul in 1803. The Library of Congress has a copy, which it acquired in 1998, digitized, and put online. Kvernberg went and looked—and, he says, “started recognising the scans. Then I realized this was the very same atlas I had held in my hands a few weeks earlier.” The Cedid Atlas was rare: only 50 were printed, and only 14 were known to be held in public institutions. It turns out that the National Library of Norway has the 15th. [via]
Mapping the American Revolution
The National Geographic website has an interview with Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, authors of Revolution: Mapping the Road to American Independence, 1755-1783 (W. W. Norton, October 2015). In the interview, Brown says that “some of the best collections of Revolutionary War maps have been among the least used. Historians tended to use the same maps over and over again to illustrate their narratives. What we did is to take the opposite view. We wanted the maps to tell the story, so we picked maps that we thought would tell the story of the battles best.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Persuasive Cartography
Persuasive cartography: it’s a term I haven’t encountered before, though I’ve seen kind of maps it refers to: propagandistic art that uses cartography to make a point—think of all those caricature maps leading up to World War I. Many of them can be found in Cornell University Library’s P. J. Mode Collection of Persuasive Cartography: there are more than 300 maps available online, plus some pages about the genre. (Above: a 1951 map from the French Communist Party that takes a pro-Soviet line against the U.S. military.) [via]
Phantom Islands
Here are two pieces on phantom islands (i.e., islands that appear on maps but were later proved never to have actually existed; some of them persisted on charts well into the 20th century) from Atlas Obscura and Intelligent Life magazine.
British Library Digitizing George III’s Map Collection
On New Year’s Eve The Arts Newspaper reported on the British Library’s efforts to digitize the 50,000 maps and plans that make up the King George III Topographical Collection. (George III was apparently quite the map collector, one not above choosing not to return maps he borrowed.) They’re about a quarter of the way through so far. The collection’s crown jewel, so to speak, is the ludicrously large (176 × 231 cm) Klencke Atlas.
Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Hyperallergic has a review of Cities of the World (Taschen, November 2015), a reprint of colour plates from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, which appeared in six volumes between 1572 and 1617. From Taschen: “Featuring plans, bird’s-eye views, and maps for all major cities in Europe, plus important urban centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this masterwork in urban mapping gives us a comprehensive view of city life at the turn of the 17th century.” Maps from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum can also be viewed online here and here. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream
Though the effects of the Gulf Stream were known to seafarers for centuries, Benjamin Franklin was the first to name it and chart it. The Library of Congress’s map blog has a post about the maps of the Gulf Stream produced by Franklin with his cousin, Timothy Folger, a ship captain who knew the currents. “Folger and Franklin jointly produced a chart of the Gulf Stream in 1768, first published in London by the English firm Mount and Page. The Geography and Map Division holds one of only three known copies of this first edition (see above), in addition to a copy of the ca. 1785 second edition.”
Mapping Indiana
Mapping Indiana: Five Centuries of Treasures is an exhibition of maps from the collection of the Indiana Historical Society. “Featuring several original—and some never before seen—pieces from our collection, Mapping Indiana explores the ways we think about maps, how we use them and how they have helped to shape Indiana.” From January 16 to April 2 at the Society’s Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center in downtown Indianapolis. [via]
Metropolis: Mapping the City
Nicolas Crane reviews Jeremy Black’s Metropolis: Mapping the City (Conway, October 2015) for Geographical magazine. “The aim is to explore through time the visualisation of cities, so we start with a terracotta plan of the Mesopotamian holy city of Nippur, in what is now Iraq, then travel through Renaissance cities, New World cities, Imperial cities and mega cities. […] If you’ve ever wondered why cities work, you’ll find the answer in this beautiful book.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)