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.
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.
Library and Archives Canada has posted a four-part series on early automobile maps to their Facebook page (they don’t have a blog, just social media accounts), featuring examples from their collection: Nova Scotia, Montreal, Banff National Park, Vancouver.
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.
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).”
Andrew Middleton, the owner of the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI (previously), has put together a map of map stores and non-commercial map institutions (archives, libraries, etc.). Comment on Bluesky to suggest other places.
Earlier this month, Andrew posted about the state of the map store, wherein he lays out what makes up his business and where he’d like to go from here. (Mind you, that was before this post and this post went all sorts of viral.)
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.
Alice Hudson, who from 1981 to 2009 was chief of the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and as such responsible for one of the world’s significant map collections, died on 6 November 2024 from complications of kidney disease. She was 77. The New York Times published her obituary yesterday.
The Newberry Library has announced that it has digitized the 754 maps comprising its Franco Novacco Map Collection, which includes Italian maps from the 16th and 17th centuries.
A large portion of the collection includes world maps of all sizes, ranging from functional to more experimental. One 1590 cordiform map, for example, places the heart-shaped world inside of a fool’s cap, resulting in an unsettling visual commentary on previous conceptions of world geography. A 1555 map, alternatively, presents the world in gores, or segmented parts, which can be cut out and pasted onto a sphere to create a globe. This blend of art, science, and history is at the heart of the Franco Novacco Collection. […]
The Newberry Library acquired the Novacco Collection from the Venetian map collector Franco Novacco himself in 1967. Since then, the maps have only been available for viewing on-site in the Newberry’s reading rooms. In early 2022, the Newberry received generous funding from Mr. Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr. and Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps to begin digitizing the entirety of the collection.
The Newberry Library is in Chicago.
Matthew Edney poses an interesting question about measuring the physical size—i.e., the length and width—of paper maps: how do we do it, and why are we doing it? “There’s a philosophical question (how do we construe this thing that we need to measure?), the question of precision (how finely do we measure?), and a pragmatic question (what use is to be made of whatever measurements are recorded?), all of which influence the selection of which part(s) of an image are to be measured. Add to that a great deal of historical inconsistency in practice, and the question becomes difficult to answer.”
“The Harvard University Institute of Geographical Exploration was one of the first and most well-wrought private institutions in aerial photography in the first half of the 20th century. Its short institutional life at Harvard was replete with materials, stories and scandal, and its pieces remain scattered today throughout the Harvard Archives and Libraries system and beyond.” Ana Luiza Nicolae tracks down what records, photos and other materials can still be found on the Harvard campus that once belonged to Alexander H. Rice’s HUIGE, which was not closely affiliated with Harvard’s geography department but was shut down at roughly the same time.
The Library of Congress reports on how its Preservation Research and Testing Division used multispectral imaging to bring out previously illegible place names on a 16th-century portolan chart of the east coast of North America. Initially the PRTD was brought in to confirm that the chart was legit before the Library purchased it (which it did last fall), but the faded iron gall ink in some areas of the map suggested obscured details that further analysis could draw out and place names that could be made legible again. According to the article, this represents the first time the Library has posted an enhanced image of one of their holdings.
More than 400 maps, previously owned by collector Howard I. Golden, have been donated to the National Library of Israel.
The antique maps, dating from 1475 to 1800, were preserved in excellent physical condition by Mr. Golden who, over several decades, collected historical maps of the Land of Israel. A significant percentage of the maps were printed before 1700 and are therefore defined as rare. NLI has cataloged and digitized the maps for preservation and research purposes, to be used as primary sources, downloadable and free-of-charge, for students, researchers, and visitors from Israel and abroad.
The library’s map collection is available online. News coverage from The Times of Israel.
Fresh from a course on the materiality—“i.e. the physical characteristics of maps: size, paper, format, printing method, color, etc.”—of maps, the Library of Congress’s Amelia Raines explores a few maps from her home state of Michigan in terms of the production methods behind them, and the context in which they were published (e.g. as part of a book).
