Above & Below: Cartography Beyond Terrain, an exhibition at Stanford Library’s David Rumsey Map Center that launched in conjunction with this year’s Ruderman Conference, “explores how cartography depicts the depths of the Earth, the ocean floor, weather systems, the solar system, and even the seemingly intangible internet—anything but the thin boundary that divides land and sky that we tend to associate with maps.” Free admission, on display through 27 February 2026.
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.
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.
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.
Mike Duggan takes a look at the exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps currently running at the Architectural Association Gallery in London, which displays the maps as cyanotypes on fabric.
In the gallery space, Le Guin’s maps are looked at in isolation rather than relating directly to a text. They demand a different kind of attention, for there is a different form of visual connection between a viewer and a gallery object than between a reader and a book. So the maps are taken out of their original context and placed in another. But this isn’t to say this new context is any less significant. […]
There will forever be a tension between the map exhibition and the ways that maps are encountered in books. By definition they are being “exhibited” and put at the centre. And there’s no doubt Le Guin’s maps look impressive here, masterfully hung, printed on deep blue cotton, bathed in warm lighting.
Draped thoughtfully in rows throughout the space is perhaps a nod to being immersed in the cartographic imagination of Le Guin. They are certainly a spectacle that encourages a closer look. But is that enough?
The exhibition runs through 6 December. The accompanying book is out now from Spiral House (and in the U.S. in January): Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Previously: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin.
Jennifer Mapes created a large corkboard map to illustrate the history of Kent, Ohio’s South End, a neighbourhood inhabited by railroad workers, immigrants, and African Americans moving north during the Great Migration.
I purposefully created this project as something that could be done cheaply, as a form of “analog” GIS, where students are asked to think spatially and consider how regional and national history played out in their own community. I am particularly interested in showing South End kids how the people who lived in their current homes contributed to Kent’s past.
The map is 60″×60″ and includes 350 3D printed transparent houses representing 25 different house styles in Kent’s South End. I’ve wired the map to light up based on answers to questions about the history [of] each house’s resident based on census records.
The map is currently on display at the Kent Free Library.
The Word for World is both an upcoming exhibition and an upcoming book exploring the maps of Ursula K. Le Guin—i.e., the maps she herself made for worlds like Earthsea.
When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.
Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined.
The exhibition runs from 10 October to 6 December at the Architectural Association Gallery in London. The book comes out from Spiral House in October. Preorder: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. Thanks to Zvi for the tip.
Previously: Limited Edition Earthsea Map Print Now Available.
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.
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.
How many libraries host map collections that you might be unaware of? The Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library’s online exhibition, Landscape and Layers, is an introduction to that library’s map holdings, which per the blog post include 19th- and early 20th-century maps of the city, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and early maps of Ohio.
Part research project, part art installation, the Italian Limes project explored a quirk about the Italian border that frankly boggles my mind a bit. Italy’s alpine frontiers with Switzerland and Austria generally follows the watershed line. Thanks to climate change and shrinking glaciers, that line has been shifting, so Italy entered into agreements with Austria (in 2006) and Switzerland (in 2009) to redefine their borders as moving borders, shifting as the watershed line changes. (This is not something I would have expected: see, for example, U.S. state boundaries remaining where the Mississippi River used to be, rather than its present course). Italy’s official maps are updated every two years. In 2014 and 2016 Italian Limes dropped solar-powered GPS sensors on the surface of a glacier to track the shifts in the border in real time; the accompanying art installations slash exhibitions allowed visitors to plot the border at that moment. A book followed in 2019. [Maps Mania]
The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.
Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.
An exhibition exploring the history of computerized mapping, GIS and remote sensing opened at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center last Friday. Processing Place: How Computers and Cartographers Redrew our World runs until March 2025.
In the long history of mapmaking, computers are a relatively new development. In some ways, computers have fundamentally changed how cartographers create, interpret, and share spatial data; in others, they simply mark a new chapter in how people have always processed the world. This exhibition features objects from the Leventhal Center’s unique collections in the history of digital mapping to explore how computers and cartographers changed one another, particularly since the 1960s. By comparing maps made with computers to those made before and without them, the exhibition invites us to recognize the impacts of digital mapping for environmental management, law and policy, navigation, national defense, social change, and much more. Visitors will be encouraged to consider how their own understanding of geography might be translated into the encodings and digital representations that are essential to processing place with a computer.
The online version of the exhibition is here.
A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China, focuses on two extraordinary Chinese maps from the early 19th century printed using Prussian blue pigment.
These maps were presented in an extraordinary format, on eight vertical sheets printed in the style of rubbings. Even more strikingly, they were rendered in a rich blue coloring. The pigment Prussian blue had recently begun to be produced in China, and these maps were amongst the first printed objects in East Asia to make use of the colorant—predating the famous use of Prussian blue by Japanese print artists soon after.
The blue maps were more than just visually astonishing. They also captured Chinese ideas about the relationship between terrestrial and celestial space, and still provide insight today into how Chinese scholars and artists conceptualized the world around them. Beautiful and powerful in equal measure, these blue maps capture details of a transitional moment in the history of China—and the wider world. This exhibition considers these two maps in the context of their production, consumption, and functionality, revealing them as unique objects in the global history of mapmaking.
The online version is full of interesting detail about the maps’ materials and production. The physical exhibition opened last weekend and runs until 31 August 2024. Free admission.
An online exhibition by the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) focuses on an atlas of Adriatic sea ports commissioned by Napoleon after the French Empire’s annexation of Italy in 1805. The Library’s English-language announcement:
Commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte himself and marked by exceptional scientific and artistic value, the 1806 atlas consists of charts and topographical views of the eastern part of Croatia’s Adriatic coastline, whose annexation to Napoleon’s empire prompted the atlas’s creation by famous cartographers Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, Ekerlin and Paolo Birasco.
The atlas’s significance in documenting the first scientifically based hydrographic surveying of the Adriatic in history and thus being an indispensable resource in any Adriatic-related research is matched by its exquisiteness in terms of its purely artistic features.
The Library’s copy of the atlas was acquired at a public auction in London in 1979. More about the NSK’s map collection (in English; all links in Croatian unless otherwise indicated).
