Via MapHist comes word of the publication of the second, revised edition of Marcel van den Broecke’s Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide. “This very practical and informative manual gives an extensive overview and a description of all the…
With his 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, Orlando Ferguson made visual his emphatic claim that the earth was flat. One hundred and eighteen years later, one of the last remaining copies is being donated to the…
The Boston Globe points to Donna Seger’s blog entry in which she has collected caricature maps from the early modern period. “The shift from conceptual to more realistic cartography in the early modern era is a very evident and important…
An item on Australian current affairs program 7.30 about the discovery by map dealer Frederik Muller of a 16th-century map describing Magellan’s voyages: Lorenz Fries’s Tabula moderna alterius hemispherius. Muller is giving a presentation on the Fries map at Southern…
The St. Augustine Record reports on a local map exhibition. Five Centuries of Our Coast: A Visual History of the Nation’s Oldest City, on now at the St. Augustine Historical Society’s Oldest House Museum Complex, “goes from a hand-drawn map…
Cartography from the Age of Exploration is an exhibition now running at the University of Florida’s Grinter Gallery until August 20. “This exhibition celebrates the 80th Anniversary of the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies with a collection…
On The Atlantic’s website, a slideshow comparing modern-day satellite images of cities with city maps from the 1572 Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. It’s not as effective as you might think: the atlas plates haven’t been georeferenced (some…
John Speed’s atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first published 400 years ago, has been digitized and put online by the Cambridge University Library, which possesses one of only five sets of proof maps. (Zoomify format;…
A couple of events taking place at Oxford’s Bodleian Library in the near future. The Gough Map (previously) will go on display in an exhibition called Linguistic Geographies: Three Centuries of Language, Script and Cartography in the Gough Map of…
To illustrate an article marking the 200th anniversary of Manhattan’s street grid, the New York Times has put together an interactive map superimposing 19th-century maps of Manhattan on the modern city. (Flash required; at some point NYT links may be…
Atlas der Neederlanden is a Dutch-language blog that explores the restoration of a nine-volume composite atlas — a bound collection of maps from different periods and by divers hands — by the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam’s…
British Map Engravers by Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams. “An illustrated dictionary of well over 1,500 members of the map-trade in the British Isles from the beginnings until the mid nineteenth century, including all the known engravers and lithographers, all…
The Leader, a Welsh newspaper, has an article about the 16th- and 17th-century historian and cartographer John Speed, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of his atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine….
An article in Australian Geographic about the map holdings of the National Library of Australia, and its work to get them digitized and put online. Previously: Australia in Maps….
Putting Bath on the Map, an exhibition of maps from a private collection that show Bath, England from the 17th century to the present. “Collectively these maps tell the story of the city’s evolution from the medieval city to the…
The Mapping of California as an Island: An Illustrated Checklist, by Glen McLaughlin with Nancy Mayo, is a cartobibliography that catalogues all known maps that depicted California as an island — 249 in all, along with title pages, frontispieces,…
A new addition to Harold Cramer’s Historical Maps of Pennsylvania website: a section on early pocket maps: Briefly, a pocket map is a separately issued, folded map with a cover; they are sometimes also called case maps. Pocket maps have…
PSFK has a piece on the New York Public Library’s Map Rectifier, ” a tool for digitally aligning (‘rectifying’) historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps.” There’s a how-to video….
The San Diego Union-Tribune covers this week’s opening of the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla, California, which displays the private map collection — about 500 items — of Mike Stone. The museum is open by appointment until regular…
A brief item from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts about their work restoring the Leventhal Center’s copy of Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Via MapHist….
A 1699 map of northeastern North America by John Thornton discovered in a house in rural Scotland (see previous entry) has been sold at auction for more than three times the expected price — the equivalent of about $320,000 U.S….
The New York Times describes the process of restoring a 240-year-old map that the Brooklyn Historical Society discovered in their possession — a rare 1770 map of New York City by Bernard Ratzer, only three other copies of which were…
A digital copy of Frederick de Wit’s rare Stedenboek — a 17th-century collection of city maps of the Netherlands — is now available on the website of the National Library of the Netherlands; BibliOdyssey posts some highlights from the…
Historian Susan Schulten, writing for the New York Times’s online Opinionator feature, examines an 1861 map showing the distribution of the slave population in the southern states of the U.S., based on 1860 census data. This map, an early…
A one-of-a-kind map of northeastern North America created in 1699 by well-known cartographer John Thornton was discovered in a house in rural Scotland after the death of the house’s owner. The 68×80 cm vellum map, which shows details of Newfoundland fishing…
On The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Postcards blog, Lawrence Biemiller has a chat with James Akerman about the history of road maps in the United States….
The Harvard Crimson reports on an exhibition at the Harvard Map Collection that looks at “cartographic curiosities”: Rev. Badger’s Misfits: Deviations and Diversions runs until January 5, 2011 at the Pusey Library. One highlight, cited both in the Crimson article…
Cartographic historian Seymour I. Schwartz, who previously donated his map collection to the University of Virginia, apparently had a few maps left over for the university in whose medical school he taught: he has donated 40 maps and drawings…
An interesting post on the blog of Harvard’s Houghton Library on their recent digitization of a 17th-century sketchbook of maps of Siberia: the Khorograficheskaya Kniga of Semën Ul’ianovich Remezov. Via BibliOdyssey….
A short, five-minute video from the Library of Congress about the physical and digital preservation of Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world. Flash required. (For the LOC’s digital versions of Waldseemüller’s maps, see this page.) Via MapHist….
The Denver Post takes a look at the map holdings of the Denver Public Library, which — in no small part due to the library’s former status as a federal repository — are apparently substantial. “If you’re feeling lost, head…
I always enjoy reading Jeffrey Murray’s articles in Fine Books and Collections magazine, and his latest, on the three-dimensional scale models made of military fortifications and cities for Louis XIV and his successors, is no exception: it’s a fascinating…
I don’t think this short article from Paul Fraser Collectibles on Matteo Ricci’s 1602 Chinese-language map of the world adds much to what we already know, but it does include the above video from Chinese media coverage of the…
Old-Map-Blog posts scans from the author’s collection of antique maps; so far they seem mainly to be from German-language atlas plates. GPSFix focuses on Garmin’s outdoor GPS receivers….
Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific, an exhibition from July 17, 2010, to January 2, 2011, in the main gallery of Princeton University’s Firestone Library, documents “the drama of the unfolding exploration of the Pacific Ocean that followed…
We’ve heard about The Atlantic Neptune, an 18th-century multi-volume atlas of the eastern shores of North America produced by J. F. W. des Barres. Jeffrey Murray returns to the pages of Fine Books and Collections magazine (see previous entry) to…
Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past is a temporary exhibition running from July 2 to October 17, 2010 at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s Mary Rose Museum. Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past brings together, for the first time, several important maps from The British…
An update on North Carolina Maps, which I first told you about in August 2008: according to this University of North Carolina Libraries item, the site’s collection now exceeds 3,200 maps: “Visitors to the North Carolina Maps site can…
A collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban rail transit maps from the University of Chicago Library’s map collection. Zoomify format; Flash required. Via MAPS-L….
The Washington Post reports on a conference held last Friday at the Library of Congress: Re-Examining the Portolan Chart: History, Navigation and Science explored the mysterious origins of the portolan chart, which apparently appeared from nowhere, with no known antecedents,…
Mike Parker has an essay in the Telegraph that refers to the two upcoming BBC TV series and British Library exhibition; Parker’s Map Addict, which I reviewed last October, is now available in paperback. As for those two BBC series,…
MAPCO, which makes high-resolution scans of antique maps available online, has added a lot of material since I first blogged about them in 2007; one of their more recent additions has been showing up a lot in my Twitter…
The Grub Street Project: Topographies of 18th-Century London “aims to map the city and its texts to create both a historically accurate visualization of the city’s commerce and communications, and a record of how its authors and artists portrayed…
An exhibition that opened this week at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center has a component of interest to antique map enthusiasts. Invented Bodies: Shapely Constructs of the Early Modern runs until June 25. This exhibition explores the many ways that Europeans…
The Independent has an article about the British Library’s upcoming map exhibition, Magnificent Maps, which opens April 30. The piece quotes British Library map head Peter Barber and makes reference to a number of maps without explicitly saying that they’re…
Fine Books and Collections magazine has published an article by Jeffrey Murray, former archivist and author of Terra Nostra, about trench maps used by British forces in World War I. In its day, the Great War was the largest…
Spacing Atlantic, an urban blog covering cities in Atlantic Canada, has a series called [Re]Presenting Halifax, which looks at historical and contemporary maps and diagrams of the Halifax region. Four posts so far, including this one on Atlantic Neptune cartographer…
It’s been covered before, but see Time magazine’s coverage of the Library of Congress exhibition of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 Chinese-language map of the world. Previously: NY Times on Ricci Map Exhibition; 1602 Ricci Map Now on Display; “Impossible Black Tulip”…
A big blog entry from the David Rumsey Map Collection about cartouches, “the elaborate decorations that frame map titles and other information about the map,” including 50 (!) examples thereof….
Two ongoing map exhibitions in New England to tell you about: Map Talk: A Conversation with Maps at the JCB, at the John Carter Brown Library of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island until March 30. Via MapHist. Writing the…
Mapping Missouri: Maps from the Collection of the Missouri State Archives opens today at the National Archives Central Plains Region headquarters in Kansas City. “Drawing from diverse examples such as land survey maps made by Antoine Soulard from 1796-1806…
Via MapHist, I learn that the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center has a newish RSS feed. It also has a Flickr account, though that’s been up and running for some time….
A travelling exhibition of early printed maps, Envisioning the World: The First Printed Maps, 1472-1700, comes to the Princeton University Library on February 7, and runs until August 1. Through the language of cartography, the maps in the exhibition illustrate…
This will be a busy spring for maps at the BBC, which has announced that BBC Four will run two television series on maps: a three-part, one-hour series called Mapping the World and a four-part, one-hour series called The Art…
Writing the Earth: 2,000 Years of Geography and Mapping opens on Saturday, January 30 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut and runs until May 2. ArtDaily: “The exhibition features a selection of world maps that were printed between 1511…
The New York Times has a review of the Library of Congress’s exhibition of Matteo Ricci’s 1602 Chinese-language map of the world, which, it turns out, is being displayed across from the Library’s copy of Martin Waldseemüller’s map. (Seems appropriate.)…
A copy of Matteo Ricci’s Impossible Black Tulip — a rare 1602 Chinese-language map of the world — is now on display at the Library of Congress. It’ll be there until April 10; after that, it will move to its…
Few copies exist of Matteo Ricci’s “Impossible Black Tulip” of 1602, the first map of the world in Chinese to show the Americas (no, stop right there), but the James Ford Bell Trust has acquired one for the University of…
The website of the David Rumsey Map Collection has been given its first redesign in its 10-year history. That redesign, by the way, includes a new blog. Via Maps-L; thanks also to peacay for the tip….
The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name by Toby Lester Free Press, 2009. Hardcover, 480 pp. ISBN 978-1-4165-3531-7 We’ve heard a…
Henry Walling’s five-foot-square “Map of the Counties of Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket, Massachusetts,” produced in 1858, is now available as a hardcover book, the Cape Cod Times reports: “The new book’s maps were shot digitally by Truro photographer Charles…
“You could lose yourself in here,” says The Scotsman’s Peter Ross, in his expansive piece about the National Library of Scotland’s map collection. Via MapHist….
I grew up in Winnipeg, so I was thrilled to discover the thousand-plus maps of Winnipeg, Brandon and the rest of Manitoba posted on the Manitoba Historical Maps Flickr account. The maps include old city maps, transit maps, insurance…
Vanity Fair points to Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009, an exhibition at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwartzman building that runs until June 26, 2010 (exhibition details here). Drawing on The New York Public Library’s collection of…
The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri gets a mention in the travel section of the New York Times (in an article on rare book collections that are accessible to the public) for its…
The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist is the Library of Congress’s online, continuously updated version of its 1981 publication, Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress. The searchable database provides listings of the 50,000 editions of Sanborn Maps…
I had thought that all the books about Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world — you know, the one that first named “America” — would have come and gone with the 2007 quincentennial of the map, but I’d…
An exhibition of 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman maps is taking place right now at Cal State San Bernadino’s Anthropology Museum. The Katip Çelebi Ottoman Map and Cultural Exhibition features cartographic works by Çelebi and Piri Reis (whom you may have…
Britain’s National Archives has launched a collection of early modern maps of Ireland; the more than 60 maps date from the late 16th to early 17th century, a period during which England was colonizing Ireland. “Attractive and colourful, these…
An exhibition of Jedediah Hotchkiss’s Civil War maps is currently underway at the Library of Congress — in the corridor outside the Geography and Maps Reading Room at the James Madison Building, but it’s an exhibition nonetheless. Via MapHist….
Times Higher Education has the fascinating story about how two rare 17th-century Portuguese atlases came to be found in the bowels of the library of the Queen’s College, Oxford….
An 1859 map of the Michigan counties of Genesee and Shiawassee in the possession of the Swartz Creek Area Historical Society is falling apart, and the society is wondering whether it’s worth spending the $3,000 to $5,000 it will cost…
BibliOdyssey had another fine post earlier this week, this one collecting items that “share the common characteristics of being a jigsaw puzzle or board game incorporating a map, and being produced before 1900.” (It’s probably worth mentioning that Risk only…
Quest: Trail Maps of the West, an exhibition of maps on loan from members of the Rocky Mountain Map Society taking place until October 4 at the Loveland Museum and Gallery in Loveland, Colorado (just south of Fort Collins), “features…
Spanish researchers claim that etchings made 14,000 years ago on a hand-sized stone represent a prehistoric hunting map: Journal of Human Evolution abstract, New Scientist, Daily Mail. From the New Scientist: Above recognisable depictions of reindeer, a stag and some…
An upcoming exhibition at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works commemorates the International Year of Astronomy by “showcasing items from the center’s science collection that survey some of the most important…
A collection of maps from the Imperial Japanese Army archives is now online. Dating from the 1880s onward, the maps cover the Asia-Pacific region, and represent the IJA’s interest in mapping the entire region. “Until the end of World War…
Divine Sky: The Artistry of Astronomical Maps is a small online exhibition featuring a selection of celestial maps from the library holdings of the University of Michigan. Divine Sky focuses on the fertile period between 1600 and 1900 that…
All Points Blog points to a forthcoming iPhone/iPod touch application called Old Map App, which, the developers say, “displays layers of geo-referenced historical maps projected onto a modern coordinate system, so that the same location can be compared over time….
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a portion of the Dunhuang Star Chart, “one of the most impressive documents in the history of astronomy.” A four-metre scroll dating from the seventh century Tang Dynasty, it’s apparently the first…
Articles from The Map Collector, a quarterly magazine published between 1977 and 1996, are being reprinted on Kuntspedia. About 30 or so articles so far; I don’t know where to begin. Via MapHist….
“Early Views of Hong Kong, 1842-1946” is an exhibition of maps of pictures and maps of Hong Kong from Wattis Fine Art in Hong Kong, including this 1866 bilingual (English-Chinese) map of Hong Kong (pictured at right), which sold…
Kevin Brown of Geographicus writes, “I am a generalist antique map dealer specializing in rare maps from the 15th through the 19th centuries. As a sideline I have also started a map blog on cartographic anomalies, current map-related events, and…
Old maps of Japan from David Rumsey’s collection that are viewable as a layer in Google Earth have gotten Google into a bit of hot water in Japan, the AP’s Jay Alabaster reports (Huffington Post, Japan Times, Washington Post). The…
Phyllis Pearsall’s famous 1936 map of London is available again. The company she founded, A to Z Maps, has published a fascimile reproduction of her map, coloured to simulate aging (the original was black ink on white paper, but…
The Bartholomew Archive at the National Library of Scotland contains the business records, publications, working maps and printing plates of John Bartholomew & Son Ltd., the Edinburgh mapmaking firm. The Archive is still a work in progress: the Library is…
In an article posted on the ABAA’s Web site, Elisabeth Burdon of oldimprints.com argues that MacDonald Gill, the artist responsible for the 1913 Wonderground Map of London Town, had a “profound” influence on later pictorial mapmaking. “Not only did…
The most recent addition to Harold Cramer’s Historical Maps of Pennsylvania site (which looks massive) is a collection of old road atlases dating from 1889 to 1930. (At right, an example from 1892.) Via MapHist….
Olivier Ruellet blogs about the Tabula Peutingeriana (in French), which is as good an excuse as any to revisit this unusual medieval artifact. Inherited by Konrad Peutinger in 1508, the Tabula was a medieval copy of a fourth- or…
The California State Automobile Association has donated 7,000 old road maps to Stanford University’s Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collections; the donation was triggered by the CSAA’s move to new headquarters with less space. “Along with the road maps,…
Mapping Texas and the New World opens Thursday at the Mason Square Museum in Mason, Texas. Includes early cartography of the New World generally and maps of Texas specifically, covering the period from Mexican independence through the early 20th century….
Historic Map Works is building a business offering cadastral and other antique maps online; from their collection of 1.2 million maps, most of which were obtained by buying the companies who published them, more than half a million have been…
David Rumsey — he of the eponymous website — is donating his entire collection of 150,000 maps, plus digital copies, to Stanford University. Just not all at once: “While Rumsey’s agreement with Stanford calls for his entire collection to be…
At the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia until May 10, 2009, Jed Hotchkiss: Shenandoah Valley Mapmaker, a collection of Civil War maps by the Confederate Army’s mapmaker. The amazing maps of Jedediah Hotchkiss helped Confederate officers…
“Exploring Waldseemüller’s World” is a two-day symposium to be held at the Library of Congress on May 14 and 15, 2009. According to the press release, it will “examine Martin Waldseemüller’s cartographic vision and address the complex historical and…
The Denver Post’s John Meyer reviews the On High: Cartography of Topography exhibition in Golden, Colorado: “if you’re a mountaineer or a map lover, don’t miss it.”…
The Mapmakers’ Art: The Bishop Collection of Antique Maps, 1608-1863 is an exhibition running at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, until March 20. “The collection of 15 maps, donated to the museum…
At the Bradford Washburn American Mountaineering Museum in Golden, Colorado from January 23 to May 31, an exhibition called On High: Cartography of Topography: The exhibition will explore the ways in which topography has been viewed and mapped throughout history….
Englishman Thomas Harriot may have beaten Galileo to the punch. According to an article in February’s Astronomy and Geophysics, Harriot may have been the first known person to observe the Moon through a telescope — and, more importantly for us…
At the Gemini Gallery in Munich until December 31, an exhibition called Maps of Japan — Japan on Maps: Benedetto Bordone published the earliest known printed map devoted to Japan worldwide 1528 in Venice based solely on the mention by…
Also via MapHist, collections of caricature maps from a couple of libraries. The Library of Congress has scans of William Harvey’s Geographical Fun, circa 1868 (at right, from that book, Scotland). And a search of the University of Amsterdam…
Over the past few months there has been some discussion on MapHist about “escape maps” — maps handed out to Allied pilots and air crews during World War II, printed on fabric (cloth, silk or rayon) and intended to…
An article in today’s Washington Post looks at the mystery about where the information found in Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map — the first one to label the New World as “America” — came from, and interviews John Hessler, author…
Vladimiro Valerio has been scanning his map collection and uploading them to his Maps and Images site. Ten atlases and four single-sheet maps, a total of 280 images, are available so far. They range from the sixteenth to the…
Via MapHist, an announcement that the E. G. R. Taylor Collection of Historic Printed Maps has been catalogued and is now available for consultation in the Special Collections Reading Room of the University of London’s Senate House Library. The Taylor…
Nevada in Maps is a nice collection of more than 4,000 maps and atlases from the collections of the University of Nevada at Reno and Las Vegas, the State Library, and the Nevada State Historical Society. The collections mostly…
North Carolina Maps digitizes old maps of North Carolina; in beta (who are they, Google?) for the moment, but plans call for more than 1,500 maps, ranging from the 1590s to the 1960s. It’s a collaboration between the North…
David Lanegran’s Minnesota on the Map: A Historical Atlas “brings together for the first time stunning but rarely seen maps of Minnesota through five centuries”; the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin has more: “The maps include early city plans of Rochester,…
The Tampa Bay History Center opens in December; over the next few years, maps from a private collection of some 2,000 maps of Florida, collected over 25 years by investment firm president J. Thomas Touchton, will be transferred to the…
Maps: From Here to There and Then to Now is a map exhibition, running from August 10 to November 30, at the Old Independence Regional Museum in Batesville, Arkansas. The Searcy, Arkansas Daily Citizen has more: Of special interest is…
BibliOdyssey has another collection of satirical caricature maps from the First World War, from British, Dutch and German sources. Previously: A Japanese Caricature Map of the World….
Maps of the arctic seem to be lost more often lately than found, but a century-old map of the Canadian arctic by Joseph-Elzéar Bernier was recently rediscovered by Quebec archivists, the Montreal Gazette reports; the article doesn’t mention where Bernier’s…
At the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, until October 12, Revisualizing Westward Expansion: A Century of Conflict, 1800–1900, an exhibition of maps from UTA’s Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library: “[T]he maps in this exhibition span the century,…
An exhibition of Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior and other maps held at the University of Amsterdam Library’s Special Collections — and they appear to have quite the Blaeu collection — along with maps by his contemporaries, is now underway and…
The University of Oregon team that brought us the Nolli Map of Rome has something new for us: Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome, which links Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome with Vasi’s contemporary etchings of…
Five maps by Frederick de Wit (1630-1706) have been digitally restored: rather than trying to restore the badly damaged originals, the maps were instead digitized and the digital copies were then manipulated. Missing parts were spliced in from other…
BibliOdyssey provides another example of what I suppose is called a caricature map: these are maps where representative caricatures are twisted into the shapes of the countries they are meant to represent. This one comes from Japan circa 1914….
In the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, Diane Dretske writes an essay in praise of county atlases: County atlases were certainly a marketing tool to sell books, but they occurred at just the right time in American history when…
Our friend Tony Campbell has put together a Web page on cartographic chronograms. But what, you may ask, is a chronogram? In a nutshell, it’s a date encrypted into a sentence or inscription. Tony’s short explanation suffices very well: A…
A collection of maps of Pittsburgh on the occasion of that city’s 250th anniversary. “This selection of maps and views presents a history of the city and region from [1758] to near the present; some can be seen on…
Until Mariner 4 photographed craters on Mars in 1965, Earth-bound telescopes were the only way to map the red planet. BibliOdyssey looks at Schiaparelli’s 19th-century maps of Mars, which gave rise to the idea that canals — canali or…
More maps from the University of Chicago Map Collection have been posted to the Web: Before and After the Fire: Chicago in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Latin American Cities Via MAPS-L. Previously: Chicago…
A digitized version of Willem and Joan Blaeu’s six-volume Toonneel des Aerdrycks, ofte Nieuwe Atlas (1659), produced for the city of Leiden, is available online from the Leiden Regional Archives; click here for the map viewer. Christie’s is auctioning two…
Topographic map symbols for historic topographic maps: “Presented here is a collection of symbols used on USGS Topographic Maps printed from the late 1890s. The styles of the symbols have changed dramatically since this time, and the beginning of their…
I have no direct experience with Second Life, but the David Rumsey Map Collection is setting up a presence there. This long blog entry on Not Possible IRL has all the details. The screenshots make it look quite evocative…
National Geographic’s Map of the Day site provides (in a vein similar to that of NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, which it is strongly reminiscent of) a map along with a brief description every weekday (more or less). Maps…
The 14th-century Gough Map, the oldest surviving map of Great Britain, is getting renewed attention with the publication of Nick Millea’s study, which, Tony Campbell says, “is the first study for fifty years of this highly important map.” To…
Seymour I. Schwartz, author of five books on the history of cartography,* is pledging his collection to the University of Virginia, which, in turn, is naming its map room in his honour today. About 50 of those 225 maps…
At the Boston Public Library’s Copley Square through June, Boston and Beyond, a collection of bird’s-eye-view maps of Boston and New England from the second half of the 19th century. At Harvard University’s Pusey Library until April 1, Henry F….
The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Gloucestershire is on display at Oxford’s Bodleian Library until February 23; the Library acquired the 16th-century tapestry at auction last year for more than £100,000. “The wool and silk tapestry … is part of a…
The New York Post has an item on the Map Room (no relation) of the Borough of Manhattan’s Topographic Bureau, which is responsible for the official maps of New York County (largely defunct and contiguous with Manhattan) since 1748; last…
Which Waldseemüller map is “America’s birth certificate” (i.e., the first map to label the New World as “America”)? Is it the one the last copy of which is now on display at the Library of Congress? Or, as the…
Maps of Vienna from the city’s government. The city’s architectural, archeological, artistic and cultural history is presented through a map-based interface (which unfortunately does not work in Safari). Clicking on points of interest brings up incredibly detailed information: the…
The long-anticipated exhibit of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map — you know, the first one to name the New World “America” — opens this Thursday at the Library of Congress. The sole surviving copy of Waldseemüller’s map, which has…
Nearly seven metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, the Tabula Peutingeriana is a 13th-century monk’s copy of a much older map of the Roman road network. This fascinating map stretches from Portugal to India — and stretch is…
An animated map depicting the history of the New York subway: “[a]n animated GIF starts with a blank subway map and draws each line in the sequence in which it was built.” For more maps showing the history of New…
I’m very keen on old fire insurance maps, so this story from the Kitchener-Waterloo Record (no idea how long it’ll be available online) made me smile. Gore Mutual, a Cambridge, Ontario insurance company, has gone to its vaults to reveal…
Last Wednesday’s Toronto Star had a brief item about an 1818 map of Toronto harbour, with lots of detail about the map itself and how it came into the current owner’s possession. Via Map the Universe….
Roger Hart did a better job of covering the issue of Vermont’s ancient and abandoned roads on GeoCarta — which is to say that he covered them and I didn’t: see here and here. In a nutshell, there are apparently…
On MapHist, John Hessler writes: Two new books on Waldseemüller and the context of the creation of the 1507 and 1516 world maps are due to be released in the next few months. The first, by Seymour Schwartz (an…
A new display beginning July 20 in the Maps Reading Room lobby at the British Library: Hollar as a Mapmaker. “The display celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of the Czech artist and etcher Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677). Best known…
Timothy Thomas writes: There are no good, hi-res images of the 1502 Cantino Planisphere — one of the earliest maps from the age of discovery. This object is included in the current exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery in…
Zoom (June 30 to August 18, Santa Monica, California). A group exhibition of map art at Santa Monica Art Studios’ Arena 1. “Working in the USA, Britain and Australia, all 19 artists in the show employ maps as resource material,…
More on Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map, the 500th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year. The Library of Congress reports that construction of the hermetically sealed encasement for their copy of the map — the last surviving…
An article from The American Surveyor that discusses the candidates for the world’s oldest map — and, interestingly, the criteria involved: what makes a map a map and not a painting, for example. The Soleto Map and the Papyrus of…
Catholicgauze calls this map — “Angling in Troubled Waters,” an 1899 map by Fred W. Rose — “one of the best historical maps I have ever seen.” The map, which apparently is reprinted in New Worlds: Maps from the…
This is a couple of weeks old, but I’m that far behind. The U.S. Library of Congress has been in possession of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map — you know, the first map with the name “America” on it…
William Roy’s Military Survey of Scotland was undertaken between 1747 and 1755, in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion, which revealed a military need for a decent survey of the country. The originals are in the hands of the…
A collection of maps of Paris for an art history course, scanned from slides (so they could be a little sharper; 8-bit only). The maps date from 1716 to 1887. Via Plep….
British map dealer Philip Burden — his company is Clive A. Burden Ltd., named for his late father — is in the U.S. on a book tour; the second volume of his massive (and expensive!) bibliographic reference, The Mapping of…
The Book of Curiosities, an 11th-century Egyptian manuscript now scanned and available online at the Bodleian Library’s web site, contains, among other things, the first rectangular map of the world as well as many other maps of the region….
Time again to report that another thousand or so maps have been added to the David Rumsey map collection. Highlights include 19th-century U.S. statistical atlases and a magnificent 1929 Italian world atlas. Via MapHist. The collection is usually updated like…
This Hungarian site has a large collection of maps from the Third Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary. The maps, which were published around 1910, are at 1:200,000 scale; they cover much of central and eastern Europe, not just the…
At Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections from April 15 to October 21, an exhibition of African maps called To the Mountains of the Moon: Mapping African Exploration, 1541-1880: The library exhibition will feature some…
Yahoo Japan’s “Tokyo Tours With Old Maps” feature, which launched in January, has apparently kindled an interest in antique maps in Japan, The Japan Times reports. Not only is Yahoo’s site — not that I can read Japanese, but does…
North by Northeast: Five Centuries of New England Maps is an exhibition running from March 31 to August 12 at the Flynt Center of Early New England Life in Historic Deerfield. “In addition to approximately 50 printed and manuscript…
A cabinet of jigsaw maps used to teach geography to the children of George III is now on public display, the Daily Telegraph reports. The cabinet and its contents were bought in 2000 and would have been exported to the…
If you have four days in July and £500, there’s a course called A History of Maps and Map-making being offered by the University of London’s Institute of English Studies as part of the new London Rare Books School, which…
On display at the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Library until June 29, Making Maps, Making History: 300 Years of Original Maps from Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region: The exhibit features an illustrated, hand-colored map of North America made in…
A new book claims that a Portuguese fleet discovered Australia in 1522, nearly 250 years before Captain Cook arrived at Botany Bay: Reuters, Daily Telegraph. The claim, by author Peter Trickett, is based on a reinterpretation of a 16th-century…
A collection of 18 maps of Chicago, dating from 1900 to 1914 and showing everything from railroads to school districts, from the University of Chicago Library, in Zoomify format. This is one of several such collections from the U…
An exhibit at Brown University’s John Hay Library opens on Monday and runs until April 25: it features some of more than one thousand maps “rediscovered” in that library. The collection represents the world throughout the time these maps…
Footpaths to Freeways: The Evolution of Michigan Road Maps is an exhibition now on display (until June) on the fourth floor of the west wing of Michigan State University’s Main Library; if you can’t visit, there is this online…
Alberto has uploaded a collection of microfilm copies of San Francisco fire insurance maps dating from around 1905 — which wuld have been just before things got very interesting indeed from a fire perspective. The trouble with microform copies…
Afriterra is an online collection of digitized maps — 500 have been done so far out of a planned thousand in the current funding round, with a total of 5,000 maps in the collection, dating from the 15th century…
Czech historians working in the research library in the city of Olomouc stumbled across a copy of a 1563 nautical atlas — only the sixth known to exist — by the Catalan cartographer Jaume Olives, Radio Praha reports. The…
This pregnant news item just begs for more detail: an Australian gold exploration company is embarking on a $216-million mining project in Egypt that was explored based on a 3,000-year-old pharaonic map that indicated locations of gold sites. Via Map…
Next Thursday evening at the Scandinavia House in New York City, a talk by map collector William B. Ginsberg about his new book on the area of his expertise, a cartobibliography titled Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic,…
My friend Robert, who’s the president of the local historical society, stopped by this afternoon with an interesting find — something he salvaged from a pile of junk that the town hall was about to throw out. It was…
The Birmingham Public Library’s Rucker Agee Map Collection contains, as you would expect, a number of old maps of Alabama, surrounding states like Mississsippi, Georgia and Florida, the U.S., and North America, but there are also world maps and…
Peacay stumbled across a relatively new addition to Princeton’s digital collections, Il regno tutto di Candia. Abstract: “This work was published in Venice in 1651, three years after the Ottomans first tried to occupy the island of Crete, Venice’s…
The second Joint International Workshop on Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage will take place on May 18 and 19 in Athens; hosted by the ICA’s Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage working group, the conference is about all matters digital, from…
Much book-related news has been accumulating over here; past time I shared it. Surveying, Mapping and GIS reviews Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a book about John Harrison, who discovered how to determine longitude. I think I need to read this book….
BibliOdyssey’s latest map-related find is Jean-Étienne Guettard’s Atlas et description minéralogiques de la France (1780), digitized and available online at the University of Strasbourg, where, peacay notes, “maps start on page 223 … the full maps at the site…
I’m overdue in presenting a couple of links regarding maps of Israel and/or the “Holy Land,” which terms may or may not be interchangeable, but you get the general idea as to area. Holy Land Maps is an online…
Dave Broer of the Broer Map Library writes: I wanted to contact you and thank you for the write ups that you have done in the past regarding my attempts at making a world-class online historic map collection available to…
MAPCO — Map and Plan Collection Online — is, as you might expect, an online collection of maps: it’s relatively small at the moment, with more promised, with maps of London, Britain and Australia, mostly from the 19th century. The…
Northwestern University has scanned and uploaded a collection of 113 maps of Africa, dating from 1530 to 1915. The map collection is a part of the university’s Herskovitz Library, named after the scholar who founded the African Studies program…
Maps of Stockholm from 1625 to 1922 are available as downloadable Google Earth layers; the file sizes can be quite substantial. It’s of interest to me that Google Earth is being deployed as a platform to distribute scans of…
Historic Pittsburgh is a site featuring documents, maps and books from the University of Pittsburgh and other Pittsburgh-area collections. Their Map Collections section has four large series of map scans available: Geodetic and topographic survey maps for Pittsburgh between…
Dave Kellam has scanned a panoramic map of New York, dating from 1939 or thereabouts, that he picked up a few months ago at a used bookstore. (Lucky find, that.) Via Plep….
The only remaining known copy of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map — the first to name the New World “America” — is owned by the Library of Congress. (Four gores also survive, according to the Waldseemüller Wikipedia page; one…
Bohdan Krawciw, a Ukrainian-born writer, translator and critic, amassed a map collection of some 900 items before his death in 1975. In November 2005, his daughter donated the collection to Harvard University; the University announced the acquisition this month:…
Fire insurance maps, with their incredible detail, are always a great find; we’ve got a couple in local collections here, and I just think they’re magnificent. Unfortunately, they originally had onerous copyright restrictions that prohibited making copies, so these treasures…
Another 1148 maps have been added to the David Rumsey Map Collection. This happens once or twice a year, but when it’s this many maps at once (as it usually is), it’s worth noting. Via MapHist; thanks also to Paul….
Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome was the subject of a major web project by the University of Oregon that launched last year; a print of the map is now available for sale through that same web site. Even the…
There are hardly any posts up yet, but the London: A Life in Maps exhibition now has an accompanying blog. Via MapHist. Previously: London: A Life in Maps — Now Open and Online; Peter Barber on “London: A Life in…
The British Library exhibition, “London: A Life in Maps,” is now open, both in real life and online. The virtual exhibition that Peter Barber referred to is now online as part of the overall London: A Life in Maps web…
The most recent issue of the Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France concerns cartography; most of the articles appear to be about early modern maps, though there’s one about the Internet as well. The table of contents, introduction…
Die Urpositionsblätter der Landvermessung in Bayern is an online collection of 19th-century topographic maps produced by Bavarian land surveyors. There are more than 900 of these 1:25,000-scale maps, put online by the Bavarian state library. Via BibliOdyssey, which shares…
Peter Barber — Peter Barber! — writes: London: A Life in Maps will be accompanied by a virtual exhibition, available on the BL website, for people who can’t visit. Though the emphasis of the exhibition will be on the great…
The Time-Gun Map of Edinburgh, published in 1861, overlays concentric circles to show “the time taken for the sound of the one o’clock gun to travel from Edinburgh Castle to different parts of Edinburgh and Leith.” Being able to calculate…
The Telegraph has more about “London: A Life in Maps,” the upcoming exhibit at the British Library (see previous entry). It opens on the 24th. Via MapHist….
A couple of Google Earth items that made me happy. First, via Ogle Earth, the Google Earth Automator Pack, a (still-in-development) collection of Automator actions for the Macintosh version of Google Earth. Second, maps from the David Rumsey collection are…
The Atlantic Neptune, “a magnificent four-volume atlas of sea charts and views of the east coast of North America, published during the American Revolutionary War by Joseph Frederick Wallet Des Barres (1722-1824),” has been scanned and put online by…
The Austrian National Library has put online 50 maps from its collection, spanning five centuries. Sorted by century (from the 15th to the 19th) and with one of those zoom interfaces. Text and interface in German only. Thanks to…
Coming up at the British Library and running from November 24 to March 4, an exhibition called “London: A Life in Maps”: “Maps, views, letters, and ephemera from the British Library collections, show the city’s transformation from a Roman…
This site is a digital archive of maps produced by the Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny, the Polish Geographic-Military Institute, which existed between 1919 and 1939 and produced some very good topographic maps of the country. Lots of scans here, all very…
At the University of Michigan’s Clements Library until December 22: Shakespeare’s World in Maps. From the Ann Arbor News article: “The maps, many of them produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime, were selected from the Clements collection and include several rarely seen…
The New Popular Mapping site is a rough and ready interface to out-of-copyright (i.e., more than 50 years old) Ordnance Survey maps of England, most of which are from the postwar New Popular Edition series. It’s basically an alpha…
The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division’s Zoom Into Maps site isn’t just an educational tool and teaching resource, it’s a portal into, guide to and sample of the division’s very large map collection. Via Very Spatial….
BibliOdyssey introduces us to an online collection by France’s national archives of the Atlas de Trudaine, a series of more than 3,000 maps made by Charles-Daniel Trudaine between 1745 and 1780. “The maps themselves are highly detailed and were…
The Broer Map Library, which I mentioned last month, seems to be coming along nicely; Dave Broer announced on Maps-L that scans of 1,300 old USGS topo maps have been added to the collection. “This brings our online offering to…
The Map of Early Modern London is an interactive annotated map of London based on the 16th-century “Agas” woodcut map, with clickable points (akin to Google Maps pushpins) that take you to more detailed information about a given location….
John Hessler’s Warping Waldseemüller is a new blog about applying mathematical methods to old maps as a way of testing their accuracy. Sounds like it’s working the same vein as the new scholarly journal e_Perimetron (see previous entry). Via MapHist….
The program for the 2006-2007 series of “Maps and Society” lectures at the Warburg Institute, University of London has been posted; they take place one or two Thursdays a month and are free to attend. Via MapHist. See previous entry:…
A new, scholarly edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia was launched in Switzerland last week. It’s apparently the first complete Greek text since an edition dating from the 1840s. The project page (in German only) is here. Via MapHist….
The Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division is a huge resource of digital images of old maps. On Wednesday they reached a symbolic but impressive milestone: they posted their 10,000 digitized map to their web site: Samuel de…
A collection of late-19th-century bird’s-eye-view maps of Texas cities will be on display at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas (near Amarillo), from March 17 to June 10 next year. This is presumably the same exhibition that was…
The theme for the fifth biennial Virginia Garrett Lectures on the History of Cartography is “Mapping the Sacred: Belief and Religion in the History of Cartography.” They take place on October 7 (lecture program) at the University of Texas at…
Learning at the British Library has a section on maps — not a comprehensive archive, but a selection that illustrates key themes for educative purposes using examples from the Library’s collection. Four sections: ideas, lies and deception, war, and wealth…
The Broer Map Library is a digital archive of scanned maps with heady ambitions — “to provide its collection of maps and atlases online in order to allow libraries and researchers who would not otherwise have access to such…
Ireland’s Historic Mapping Archive is a new online collection of two 19th-century mapping series from the Irish Ordnance Survey: 1:10,650-scale maps produced between 1837 and 1842, in black and white and colour; and 1:2,500-scale black-and-white maps produced between 1888 and…
Tarek Kahlaoui, who is working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Islamic cartography in the 13th to 16th centuries at the University of Pennsylvania, has just started a blog on the subject that will include, over time, a bibliography of the…
Two maps held at the National Library of Australia for nearly a century have only recently been identified as original 1697 charts by Vlamingh, rather than printed copies, and as such are the oldest maps of Australia in Australian hands,…
Blogs about antique maps, rather than the geospatial industry, are few and far between, but a new blog about antique maps and map collecting, plus the usual gamut of general subjects, started last month, with an eerily similar premise: Map…
It’s in Dutch, so I’m likely missing most of the nuances, but this site — De WoonOmgeving — has both 1832 cadastral and 2000 topo maps of the Netherlands available through the same interface; if both are available for a…
Boing Boing links to Los Angeles Mapped, the online version of an exhibition of historical maps of Los Angeles on display through January 2007 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The maps on display are diverse in both subject…
Another Flickr group: Old Maps. Featuring scans of. See previous entries: Flickr Geotagging Group; Art of the Road; Feel Small Project; Flickr Users’ Map Photos. See also Map Site Directory: Flickr….
Vermessen: Kartographie der Tropen (“Between Cancer and Capricorn: The Cartography of the Tropics”) is an exhibition taking place at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin until August 27. The site is in German, but the introduction has been translated into English;…
This page overlays out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (circa 1925 to 1945) on the Google Maps interface. Via Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc. See previous entry: Ordnance Survey Overlays on Multimap Aerial Photos….
I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned portolan charts on The Map Room yet. In that vein, don’t miss peacay’s big post on BibliOdyssey about Battista Agnese’s sixteenth-century Portolan Atlas, scans of which are available on several sites….
Highlights of this page about the collection of the U.S. Naval Observatory include scans from several celestial atlases, including Bayer’s Uranometria (1661), Flamsteed’s Atlas céleste (1774), and Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas (1822). Via MetaFilter….
A tutorial on the history of cartography from professors at the University of Passau. A slide-based general overview, originally in German but translated into several other languages including English; some sections aren’t yet complete. It ends too soon: in the…
The Berlin City Map Project puts 26 maps of Berlin, from 1738 to 1989, online. It’s an amateur project; the author uses a flatbed scanner to scan city plans a piece at a time. Images are watermarked. Thanks to peacay…
For a so-called “remaindered link,” this is an impressive post: Jason Kottke began by linking to a story in today’s New York Times about Egbert Viele’s 1874 map of Manhattan — still used today by civil engineers because it…
This is a nice find: a good-sized collection of maps of North Carolina, some dating as far back as the 17th century. The maps were scanned by the state archives; the ones I perused were in quite high resolution. Some…
e_Perimetron is a new quarterly web journal, the focus of which is the application of geospatial technologies to old maps. The first issue, for example, has articles that transform old maps to conform to known coordinates, assign projections to portolans,…
Charles Ryan writes, “I am looking for information on copper engraved plates used — many, many years ago — for producing maps and charts, particularly for Naval Hydrographic Office charts. Can you recommend a source for doing some research or…
Alexi Karimov’s collection of Russian forestry maps, ranging from 1733 to 1920, are drawn from scans made of maps in the Russian archives for his lectures. Enjoy them on his site, but keep him out of trouble with Russian archivists…
Old London Maps is a gem of a collection of antique maps and engravings depicting London from medieval times to the nineteenth century. Greenwood’s map of London (pictured at right; see previous entry) is there, as are many others. Thanks…
Thanks to MapHist, a book about maps and art during the Renaissance has been brought to my attention: art historian Francesca Fiorani’s The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy. This book, according to the publisher, “focuses…
A 1550 map of Mexico City by cosmographer Alonso de Santa Cruz, currently held at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and normally not available to the public — it’s only one of two maps of 16th-century Mexico City —…
Charles Booth’s late-nineteenth-century map of London poverty (see previous entry) is getting some additional attention lately: Boing Boing and Cartography link to this page, which compares Booth’s map with a 2001 map of London, and this Economist article, which discusses…
A University of Tulsa graduate student has stumbled across rare maps in the university library’s collection, including an 1822 map of North America by Henry S. Tanner, the Tulsa World reports. It turns out that incoming maps and other non-book…
A collection of 20 maps, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries, from the Sumida Maritime Materials Collection. National and local maps of Japan, a map of Korea, a world map dating from 1699, and several miscellaneous maps make appearances….
Digitized antique maps from the Minnesota Historical Society’s collection, which numbers 19,000 maps and 2,000 volumes. The online sample is likely much smaller than that, but nevertheless includes a number of land survey maps, plat books (?) and atlases from…
If you’re interested in antique celestial atlases, you’ll want to bookmark Historical Celestial Atlases on the Web, which provides links to a number of online reproductions of old star atlases. Via La Cartoteca. See previous entries: The Face of the…
Australia on the Map, 1606-2006 is a web site that commemorates the 400th anniversary of the first charting of Australia by European explorers. For our purposes, the neatest part of the site is five scans of early maps of Australia…
Peacay’s got a nice post up on BibliOdyssey about the 1585 Theatri Orbis Terrarum Enchiridion by Favolius and Galle — not to be confused with the atlas with a similar name by Ortelius, a contemporary of theirs. “This atlas was…
The Cartography of Brazil in the Collections of the National Library is an online collection of more than 300 maps of Brazil and South America from the National Library of Portugal. The main goal of this project was to make…
Euratlas, a map store, has a collection of 18th- and 19th-century maps of Europe at two zoom levels; the detail is just transfixing. At right, detail from an 1852 map of post roads and railways in and around Germany. Other…
I’ve previously mentioned David Rumsey and his eponymous web site, an online repository of thousands of digitized maps from his even larger private collection. But yesterday Paul (aka peacay) wrote to say that the site had added more than a…
BibliOdyssey points to an exhibition of antique maps of the Champagne-Ardenne region of France: Terres de Champagne-Ardenne: Cinq siècles de cartographie (in French, naturally). The exhibition is touring various library locations in that region; the online version’s a bit complicated…
Patterns of Progress, an exhibition of Texas bird’s-eye-view maps — previously covered here — is now running at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas until May 28. More than sixty highly detailed and oversized prints in this special…
The Chicago Tribune profiles local map collector Robert A. Holland, whose book, Chicago in Maps, 1612 to 2002, was published late last year. From the article: “In a section of the book Holland thinks of as ‘worlds within worlds,’ the…
Some upcoming map and map-related exhibitions to tell you about: Silver Spring, Maryland: From a NOAA press release: “Artifacts representing nearly 200 years of science, service and stewardship by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its ancestor agencies will…
Recently I’ve received several questions relating copyright and reproducing other maps, so I thought I’d deal with them all at once. The first question deals with reproducing maps that may or may not be in the public domain; the second…
Never mind the Soleto Map: pottery doesn’t count as maps, apparently. The City of Turin (Torino), as part of its celebrations related to next month’s Winter Olympics, will have on display the first-century-BC Papyrus of Artemidorus, which, while several centuries…
A collection of maps of undersea cables, beginning with Atlantic telegraph cable maps from 1858 and finishing with a world cable map from 1992. Most of the maps are older, though, and quite interesting. Via Things Magazine….
The Texas General Land Office is selling reproductions of antique maps of Texas for as little as $20, an Austin TV station reports. Thanks to Tony Campbell for the link….
Today’s New York Times has a feature about the New York Public Library’s $5-million renovation of its map room, which reopens Thursday as the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division. The map room touts itself as the public library…
Yesterday’s Grauniad featured a review of three mapping books with a heavy emphasis on the art of cartography: Charles Booth’s 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty, a London Topographical Society reprint that for some reason isn’t on their site; Peter…
Opening today in Vienna, the Globe Museum of the Austrian National Library at its new digs in the refurbished Palais Mollard. The collection of more than 400 globes, 240 of which are on display, includes early modern globes by Mercator,…
Jack Rosenthal, a Wyoming TV executive, has donated his collection of old maps of the state to a local museum. More about Rosenthal and his map jones in this quasi-coherent article from the Caspar Star-Tribune. Via GeoCarta….
At the Toronto Free Gallery until December 17, “Here Be Dragons: The Cartography of Globalization,” an exhibition of “counter-cartography”. From the gallery’s flash-based web site: “Recently, activists, artists and researchers have used the form of the map to visually represent…
To follow up on my previous post, here’s the home page for this year’s ICHC, held last July in Budapest, which its coordinator, Zsolt Török, wanted me to point you to….
Thomas Klöti passes on links to the home pages of the Swiss-based Cartographica Helvetica, a German-language journal about the history of cartography, and the forthcoming International Conference on the History of Cartography, which takes place in Berne in July 2007….
In today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph, an article about the oldest map in the western world: the Soleto Map, unearthed two years ago in southern Italy, which dates to 500 BC. The map, which is on a postage-stamp-sized fragment…
Plep points to the Greater Toronto Area Digital Mapping Project, done by the University of Toronto’s map library. It’s old-style and not very accessible (it requires a plugin), but it’s got a collection of old maps and more recent aerial…
Here’s another big, expensive atlas to tell you about: Cyrus Alai’s General Maps of Persia, 1477-1925. According to Tony Campbell, who wrote the introduction and brought it to our attention on MapHist, Alai spent 15 years examining 1,200 maps…
A seminar about errors in early maps takes place this Saturday in Annapolis, Maryland; topics for discussion include extra islands in John Smith’s maps of Chesapeake Bay (see previous entry) and maps showing California as an island….
Gadling points to a new release from über-expensive book publisher Taschen: a reproduction of Joan Blaeu’s 1665 Atlas Maior. The original was in Latin and in 11 volumes; the modern version is nearly 800 pages, weighs 7.2 kg, and, from…
The British Library’s new Turning the Pages online gallery, which presents rare books in a Flash-based interface where you physically turn the pages with your mouse pointer (a bit overdone, but it works), includes Mercator’s sixteenth-century atlas of Europe. Via…
Géo212 reports that Coronelli’s globes are on display in Paris for the first time in 25 years, as part of the reopening of the Grand Palais. See coverage from the Nouvel Observateur and Radio France Internationale; if you don’t read…
Treasured Maps, an exhibition of more than 80 rare maps and atlases from the New York Public Library’s Map Division holdings, is on now through April 9, 2006 at the NYPL’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library (Fifth Avenue and 42nd…
NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey’s Historical Map and Chart Collection “contains over 20,000 maps and charts from the late 1700s to present day. The Collection includes some of the nation’s earliest nautical charts, hydrographic surveys, topographic surveys, geodetic surveys, city…
From Canada’s National Archives, the Electoral Atlas of the Dominion of Canada, which publishes scans of the original 1895 maps of federal electoral districts; these would have been in use during the 1896 election. Thanks again to peacay (whose new…
Antique Maps of Iceland: “All antique maps of Iceland (older than 1900) that are in the collection of the National and University Library of Iceland and the Central Bank of Iceland have been converted to a digital format and…
The W. H. Pugsley Collection of Early Canadian Maps at McGill University: In 1971-72 Dr. William Howard Pugsley, a McGill alumnus, donated a collection of 50 early Canadian maps, dating from 1556 to 1857, to the McGill University Libraries. Dr….
The Ryhiner Map Collection “consists of more than 16,000 maps, charts, plans and views from the 16th to the 18th century, covering the whole globe. Together with the 20,000 manuscript maps of the State Archives, the Canton of Berne owns…
Also from the USC Digital Archive, WPA land-use survey maps for the City of Los Angeles, 1933-1939: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) conducted a land use survey from December 18, 1933 to May 8, 1939 for the city of Los…
The USC Digital Archive’s Sea of Korea Map Collection consists of original old maps, dating from 1606 to 1895, in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Latin, German and Russian. It was formed by digitizing the combination of two private collections…
A simply massive collection of historic maps of Florida — “over 3,100 Florida maps from the 1500s through the present” — from Exploring Florida, an online educational resource. Via Plep….
The Gough Map is the oldest surviving road map of Great Britain. (Pictured above; east is at the top of the map.) The map itself dates to around 1360, but was discovered by Richard Gough in 1774, and donated…
Of Maps and Men: In Pursuit of a Northwest Passage is an online exhibition from the Princeton University Library; it’s got an excellent collection of map scans: this page has 12 of them, dating from 1528 to 1907, which reflect…
Maps of central Asia and western China produced by Russian cartographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from the China Historical GIS project. Thanks to Language Hat for the link. See previous entry: Soviet Topo Maps; Old Russian…
Coordinates is the journal of the Map and Geography Round Table of the American Library Association. It’s an online journal; articles are published irregularly rather than on an issue-by-issue basis, and, even better, it’s freely available, in HTML and PDF…
Peacay reports that he has discovered the Hargrett Library’s map collection at the University of Georgia, which, according to the site, “maintains a collection of more than 800 historic maps spanning nearly 500 years, from the sixteenth century through the…
Crux was a 2000 exhibition of rare maps from the State Library of New South Wales. The exhibition web pages aren’t nearly as interesting, though, as viewing all 89 maps from the exhibition via the library’s online catalogue, and you…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Antique Maps Database: “The Antique Maps of China collection includes more than 230 maps, charts, pictures, books and atlases. It represents almost all samples of China maps produced by European cartographers from…
Alabama Maps is a big collection of maps from the University of Alabama’s Cartographic Research Laboratory, in three main sections: contemporary maps, which features maps generated by the laboratory; historical maps, a collection of digitized images of old maps (not…
The International Antiquarian Map Sellers Association, founded in 2002 to “promote the professional trade in antiquarian, collectible maps and related books,” has a code of ethics; given recent events, see especially section 3. Not that professional sanctions have ever been…
Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome was a masterpiece: it was detailed, accurate and eschewed the prevailing “bird’s-eye” perspective for an overhead view. Researchers at the University of Oregon has put together a major web site on Nolli’s map, complete…
Frederik den Femte, King of Denmark between 1746 and 1766, had a map collection that grew to more than 3500 plates in 55 volumes. Denmark’s Royal Library has scanned these plates and made them available online; a plugin is required…
University course pages are frequently hidden gems. Readings for week nine of Prof. Kelly’s Medieval Literature and Culture course at Northeastern University focus on maps and travel literature from the 13th to 15th centuries, and include some excellent scans of…
Texas Bird’s-Eye Views presents 59 bird’s-eye views of 44 Texas cities in the late 1800s, and provides some background on the genre and the itinerant artists who moved from city to city offering their services. (Thanks, peacay.) See previous entry:…
For someone who claims he’s not a map aficionado, peacay’s awfully good about sending me excellent links to map sites. His latest submission is from a site that looks at the process of enclosure in Berkshire in the eighteenth and…
The New York Public Library’s Map Division has literally hundreds of thousands of maps and thousands of atlases in its vaults; hundreds of them are available online through the library’s Digital Gallery. Holdings include the Slaughter Collection of English maps,…
Reed College’s Antiquarian Maps site hasn’t been updated in six years, and several pages have presumably been “under construction” since that time. But, says peacay, who submitted this link, “there are definitely some fine maps available — with a high…
“Mapping Colonial America” is (1) an online exhibit on the Colonial Williamsburg site, available in low-bandwidth and high-bandwidth Flash versions; (2) a real-life exhibit at the DeWitt Wallace Museum of Decorative Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, running until October 9; (3)…
MapSouthampton is Southampton City Council’s interacctive mapping service; it’s a Java-based map tool that allows you to view, pan and zoom several layers of data — the sort of slow, clunky web-based interface to GIS data that looks embarrassing since…
Pablo Halkyard writes: I am trying to find out about a German cartographer, Matthaeus Seutter (1678-1757) who drew and published a map called “Le Pays de Perou et Chili” (The Countries of Peru and Chile). I am trying to find…
Digital Fine Art, which does reproductions from the collections of the National Library of South Africa, has a couple of pages of scans of 17th- and 18th-century maps of Africa and, more specifically, the Cape. Thanks to PK for the…
The 1895 U.S. Atlas features reasonably high-resolution scans of maps of U.S. states, counties and territories from that year. Via Plep (our countdown to International Plep Day continues)….
As part of its digital archives, the Delaware Public Archives has put online a collection of maps, one of which dates back to 1688. Thanks to Rick Stratton for the link….
The National Archives of Japan’s Digital Gallery has a substantial online collection of old maps, scanned at high resolution. Thanks to peacay for the link….
Dan Brown has been having fun browsing the Library of Congress’s online map collection, and spends some time looking at an old (and, at least on his page, undated) map of Middleton, Connecticut. Via Things Magazine….
A reproduction of the 1911 Baedeker guide for Paris — it’s small, and I’m not a fan of the interface, but it’s neat to see how much of the city has remained unchanged (I see a lot of familiar places)….
Debbie MacPherson writes, “I’m wondering if you know where I can find a picture of the mapmakers Jan Jansson and Herman Moll for an exhibit I am working on called Places & Spaces. I appreciate any help you could provide.”…
From the British Library, an online exhibition: The Unveiling of Britain. When the ancient Greeks looked beyond their Mediterranean world, Britain was virtually invisible, lost in the mists of legend. Their view, or lack of it, survived as late as…
Jonathan Hipkiss writes to tell us about his massive collection of maps scanned from old books, many of which date from the 1800s, all of which are scanned at 600 dpi, which is quite high-resolution. I have a growing collection…
Online at the National Library of Scotland: “The first Atlas of Scotland, containing 49 engraved maps and 154 pages of descriptive text, translated from Latin into English for the first time.” Via Plep. See previous entries: Pont’s Maps of Scotland;…
Next Wednesday at the Washington University in St. Louis, a talk by history professor Christine R. Johnson titled “The Art & Science of Renaissance Mapping: Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.” At the end of the 16th century, Europe was remaking…
In 1608, Capt. John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay area, and in 1612 a map of his travels was printed. Now, nearly 400 years later, in an attempt to prove that Smith visited the site of the present-day town of…
Ezra Padoa writes with a few links to collections of Russian/Soviet maps. First off are collections of Soviet military topographical maps. Says Ezra, “I’ve heard that Soviet military cartographers could be tried for treason if they made any mistakes. At…
Murky writes, “through no prior planning, I stumbled over the mappa mundi this weekend.” Here’s his account of his encounter with the Mappa Mundi in Hereford. (See previous entry: Mappæ Mundi.)…
Historic Cities is an ambitious Israeli project that presents scans of old maps of cities from across Europe, North Africa and the Near East. High-resolution scans of some of the maps, which date back at least as far as the…
Genmaps is “a site devoted to online images of English, Welsh and Scottish maps from their beginnings to the early 20th Century.” It’s quite a large collection, with maps dating as far back as the 1500s, though some of the…
Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of David Rumsey, whose eponymous web site hosts a massive digital archive of his even more massive private collection of old maps: 10,000 maps — out of a total collection of 150,000! It’s…
Murky posts the story of the map his grandfather kept while a prisoner of war during World War II, along with scans of the map itself. It is a flimsy document, held together with a wing and a prayer, and…
The University of New Hampshire Library has put online a digital collection of old topo maps of New England and New York. Very high-resolution scans. This online collection of over 1500 USGS topographic maps includes complete geographical coverage of New…
The Philadelphia Print Shop has a page on mythical geography in antique maps: Illusions, Confusions and Delusions. Old maps are filled with inaccuracies — rivers running a wrong course, cities placed incorrectly, coastlines lacking bays, and mountains, lakes and islands…
The Guilford Rail System web site has a page of maps of two of its predecessor railroads: a 1916 map of the Boston and Maine (853 KB JPEG) and a 1923 map of the Maine Central (456 KB JPEG). I…
Still working on my backlog of links. Here’s a collection of bathymetric maps — i.e., nautical maps showing soundings (depth) at various points — of Scottish freshwater lochs published in the early 20th Century. The survey was done from 1897…
When I picked “The Map Room” as the name of this blog, it was because I wanted a relatively generic name, and it was in recognition of the fact that many university libraries’ map collections are called map rooms. Such…
Via Colby Cosh (link semi-permanent), here’s maproom.org (no relation), from which you can download high-quality scans from old maps and atlases. Seems to be part of a larger project by map enthusiast Nick Wedd; there’s more at maproom.co.uk (also no…
“Continuing my crusade to provide you with the finest fictional maps,” says Jeff Patterson, who provides us with a link to Maps of Boccaccio’s Decameron. It’s part of a study site on that work of medieval literature; includes maps from…
Antique Maps of Iceland: All antique maps of Iceland (older than 1900) that are in the collection of the National and University Library of Iceland have been converted to a digital format and are accessible here. The library does not…
Also via Things Magazine, a scan of an 1870 system map (large JPEG) of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, from a site that archives timetables of New Jersey railroads….
The second Osher Map Library link brought to us by Plep is to a reproduction of Henry Popple’s 1733 map of North America: This web site presents a subset of Mark Babinski’s Henry Popple’s 1733 Map of The British Empire…
Another exhibition that took place years ago but which still has a web presence: The Cartographic Creation of New England. With lots of images of early maps (the collection includes immediate post-discovery woodcuts from the late fifteenth century, and carries…
Though there have certainly been changes, the remarkable thing about this 1937 map of the Paris metro is that it shows how much of the current network was already in place by then (via Kottke; see previous entry: Paris Metro)….
Despite the fact that the tagline in my about page mentions mappæ mundi, I’ve yet to mention them in this blog. Links are (of course) welcome. I’ll get things started with the Wikipedia entry and a bibliography of mappæ mundi…
An extensive web site about the Great Northern Railway in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley includes reproductions of 1890s-era maps of railroads in the Pacific Northwest and early twentieth-century maps of the Fraser Valley region….
Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 (at the Library of Congress as Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869) has maps, including digital scans of a number of original maps from that period. (via Plep)…
I’ve posted enough maps of London here that I was sure that I had posted Greenwood’s Map of London, 1827 before, but apparently not. So here you go: an interactive version that allows you to click on individual panels to…
Richard points me to the Stanford Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project. “This is one of my favourite map stories,” he says. This enormous map, measuring ca. 18.10 × 13 meters (ca. 60 × 43 feet), was carved between 203-211 CE…
Members of Tribe.net’s Map Lovers tribe (moderated by yours truly) have posted links to nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps of Boston, New York and San Francisco. Neat stuff….
The Library of Congress has an online collection of panoramic maps — i.e., maps seen from a so-called “bird’s-eye view” rather than from directly above. I saw an awful lot of these in archives and libraries when I was doing…
“The Madaba Mosaic Map is a unique piece of art realised in 6th cent. A.D. as a decoration for the pavement of a church in the town of Madaba (Jordan) in the Byzantine Near East… . [It] is…
The Cartoonist has discovered the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, which has quite a bit of stuff on celestial mapping. In addition to an exhibition of rare books and maps called The Face of…
