Unto the Ends of the Earth

Stalin's USSR for fellow travellers

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 16:34:00 +0000

A tiny riddle solved. I’d been wondering why I only seemed to see (apparently) defective copies of the 1932 Pocket Guide to the Soviet Union, published by Vneshtorgisdat for the official Soviet travel agency Intourist. Four maps are called for, but only two ever seemed to be present, with no signs that anything had been removed. Then I found my answer: only the general regional maps were folded into the main publication. The city plans of Moscow and Leningrad were issued separately, in printed wrappers without price or publication details (other than the basic title of the guide). Unusually thoughtful in some ways, as it made them easy to use, but irritating for the bookseller as nine times out of ten book and maps have become separated over the years. Here they are together:

Intourist was created in 1929 to promote the USSR’s image overseas. Stalin’s Russia wasn’t a closed country by any means, although many western tourists arrived as part of delegations sent by trade unions and other sympathetic groups. A majority, presumably, were predisposed to be impressed, but just to be on the safe side they were closely monitored and they were also encouraged to mix primarily with their Soviet counterparts. Parts of the English-language guide are very worthy, covering economic geography, the Five Year Plan and labour legislation. Some of the sites marked on the map reflect similar preoccupations:

In this corner of Moscow the principal (marked) attractions are Rubber Factory Number 3 and creche, the Rubber Factory Club and the Institute of Red Professors (which was abolished in 1938; it seems that the 1932 edition was the first and only, though I’ll keep an eye on internal dating evidence in other examples I see in case they were ever revised.)

Among the vignettes in the margins modern factories get equal billing with more conventional attractions such as the planetarium, and Soviet sites such as Lenin’s Mausoleum. The same can be said of the map of Leningrad, although historic pre-revolutionary sites such as the Admiralty and the rostral columns seem to have the upper hand. Such is the nature of the city.

By contrast, here is a French-language plan of Moscow from roughly the same period (c. 1932), again published in Moscow by Editions Vnechtorgisdat and also (of course) issued with the approval of Intourist:

This is a much more straightforward art deco tourist map, listing public buildings and monuments, theatres, stations and hotels - there isn’t a factory to be seen. The emphasis here is on the cultural importance of the Soviet capital.

november-blog: at the British library...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:03:47 +0000

november-blog:

at the British library http://instagr.am/p/WU2YugCGJO/

"The dogs of war are loose in Europe"

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:07:00 +0000

This map was conspicuously absent from the blog post on First World War satirical maps which I wrote over a year ago. “Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark!” is a famous image, but I didn’t have an example in stock back then. I’ve finally found one and I plan to make up for my omission now, but if you are interested in how this map sits alongside others of this genre do read the earlier piece: http://tinyurl.com/72ebeg2

The map was published by G.W. Bacon in 1914 with a title drawn from the traditional (and subversive) rhyme. We don’t know the artist, but it was designed by Johnson, Riddle & Co, and supplied with a text liberally sprinkled with dog-related puns by Walter Emanuel. As map-dealer Roderick Barron has noted, Emanuel was a regular contributor to Punch but he was specifically known to contemporary readers for his anthropomorphic dog books illustrated by Cecil Aldin, including The Dogs of War (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co, 1906). His association with this piece can hardly be chance.

The belligerent powers at the centre of the map have been given appropriate canine form: a British bulldog, French poodle, German dachshund and - in reference to Austro-Hungary’s volatile ethnic fault line - an Austro-Hungarian mongrel.

Britain is represented by a Churchillian sailor (Churchill was First Sea Lord and - only partially obscured by the whiskers of this humble Jack Tar - the features do resemble his; it may, however, be entirely coincidental: I may be influenced by the sub-Churchillian jowls of the British bulldog).

Here’s the very German dachshund, complete with pickelhaube and Kaiser Bill moustache, getting a bloody nose:

It’s not exactly visceral stuff, but look closely and there are other splashes of blood. The Austrian mongrel is being stung on the foreleg by the Serbian hornet, but his tail is already caught under the Russian steamroller, piloted by the Tsar himself and threatening to crush the Central Powers through sheer weight of numbers.

The treatment of Turkey is particularly interesting. The Turk is one of the few human figures on the map (a failure of imagination on the part of the artist, or is the zoomorphic/anthropomorphic divide more pointed?) The Ottoman crescent is raised over Constantinople but the Imperial German tricolour flies from the battery protecting the Dardanelles and the battleships in the Black Sea. The artist acknowledges German military support for their Turkish ally, but the Turk is pulling the strings tied to the battleships and he controls the water gate which closes the Dardanelles to the British ships milling nearby. A foolish German lapdog of indeterminate breed, wearing a token fes, is tied to the Turk’s waist.

The motif of battleships on strings is repeated by the British sailor on the other side of the map. We are invited to see them as iron dogs of war, straining to be unleashed, but it also gives them an unreal, toylike quality. This is a scrap between dogs and not to be taken too seriously. To quote from Emanuel’s text, as I have in the title of this post: “accidents will happen in the best regulated families”. Like other maps of this nature, it reflects the sentiments prevalent at the outbreak of war.

UPDATE: March 1 2013. This afternoon I showed this map to a couple who came into the shop (looking for geological maps, initially …) and the first thing they said was “oh look, it’s Churchill”. The identity of the British sailor, top left, isn’t necessarily the most important feature of the map, but after thinking about it and discussing the map with friends I am even less convinced than I was a week ago that the widely accepted view - that it is a representation of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty - is correct. I can see the popular appeal of presenting him as a humble rating, even adding some whiskers for effect, but the features are those of an older man. This could only be Churchill in 1940, not 1914. My money is on John Bull (who often does have whiskers and is generally presented as ruddy cheeked and in the prime of life).

What is Blaeu trying to say?

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:08:00 +0000

I’ve just been contemplating one of Willem Blaeu’s more striking cartouches, which adorns the map of the Turkish Empire which he engraved in the 1630’s. It was copied directly by cartographers including Merian, and clearly influenced others such as de Wit. But what message was he attempting to convey? This example, with original hand-colour, was printed in Amsterdam by his sons Cornelis and Joannes in 1640, a couple of years after his death:

Here’s a detail of the cartouche itself:

Most descriptions of the map which I have read make vague references to a depiction of the Ottoman Sultan enthroned between ‘two allegorical figures’ or even ‘servants’. Allegorical they most certainly are (both clad in loosely classical garments), but I suspect they are menacing the Sultan rather than serving him. The motto at the foot of the plinth is a Latin proverb derived from Sallust: ‘small states flourish through unity; the greatest are torn apart by discord’. It would have held particular relevance for a Dutch cartographer as the first part of the phrase was adopted by the Dutch Republic, and it was minted on the coinage Blaeu would have handled on a daily basis. Blaeu may be suggesting that the patchwork of small states visible in the upper left hand corner of the map will eventually triumph over the Ottoman Empire, although in this period, despite occasional military reverses, the Empire remained an expansionist power. In this light the allegorical figures may represent discord and harmony: the fruits of ‘war’ (or possibly internal strife, who is dressed as a typical Renaissance Roman), and a distinctly Amazonian ‘unity’, triumphantly brandishing a scimitar. The Sultan’s pose is regal, but ‘war’s’ inverted torch suggests the end of empire, and ‘unity’s’ scimitar is dangerously close to the Sultan’s ear.

UPDATE: March 2013

I thought it might be worth contrasting Blaeu’s Turkish Empire cartouche with the one he prepared for his map of Persia:

Same cartographer, same period and covering a neighbouring region, but an entirely different approach. The central figure is generally thought to be Shah Abbas the Great (see, for example, Cyrus Alai in General Maps of Persia, Brill 2010). He is richly attired and flanked by two of his guards - protected, rather than threatened. The decorative elements on most early modern European maps of Persia also accentuate the positive, with images emphasising the wealth, power, scientific knowledge and trading potential of the Persian Empire. Maps of Persia also show a greater density of place-names than any other Asian country mapped in this period. Trade is the key. Persia was the most accessible Islamic country, a possible gateway to the riches of the East, which shared a common enmity with the Ottoman Turks with the European ambassadors, adventurers and merchants who ventured there in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Becoming a Bookseller: Food & Drink

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:03:37 +0000

Becoming a Bookseller: Food & Drink:

pindabryarsbooks:

For those of us not perverse enough to fast and abstain in the dead of winter, here’s a new crop of food and drink titles.

From the Home Entertaining Series there’s a 1955 edition of Robert Vermeire’s Cocktails: How To Mix Them (£50), a classic of the barman-written genre.

Robert’s neat…

More map cover art ...

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 14:54:59 +0000

More examples of maps which have interested me. All happen to be from the same era, but I’m making no further claims for coherence - they just instances where the cover art alone is worth the price of admission.

The cover for an aeronautical chart of Germany:

I had never realised that the original BP was German-owned. I had long associated the company with Anglo-Persian Oil, but it seems the story doesn’t start there. Nor was I aware of the active role played by the company - which was by now British-owned - in the interwar German market. Fortunately I found a concise summary on Ian Byrne’s excellent ‘Petrol Maps’ website:

Despite its name, the original company which carried the name BP in Britain was controlled by the German-owned Europäische Petroleum Union, which was the sole vendor of Shell motor spirit in the UK. Expropriated as foreign property during the First World War it was sold in 1917 to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, in which the UK Government had bought a major stake. This did not deter Anglo-Persian/BP from entering the German market itself in the early 1920s and towards the end of the decade it progressively took control of the former Oil Exporting organisation from Romania, which sold motor spirit in Germany under the name “OLEX”.

Here’s a link: http://www.ianbyrne.free-online.co.uk/bp-germ.htm The site is highly informative and worth visiting even if you are not a petrol map head.

Here’s a 1936 Deutsche Lufthansa Summer Timetable (with route map), for the English-speaking market:

The aircraft in silhouette is the Ju 52, flanking the Olympic rings. 1936 was the year of the Berlin Olympics and the year that the Ju 52, introduced as a civilian airliner, was tested in action for the first time - serving with the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. Used as a bomber (at Guernica, for example) as well as a transport, the Ju 52’s shadow would never again fall quite so benignly. The back cover advertises what remains the world’s only regular, commercial, intercontinental airship service, between Germany and South America.

‘England’s blame’ was a 1939 supplement to the Illustrierter Beobachter (‘Illustrated Observer’), a propaganda magazine published in Munich by the Nazi party:

It unfolds to reveal maps of the world and the British Isles. On the cover, a pipe smoking corporal is borne along by enslaved subjects of the Empire. A bit thick, one might say, given some of the schemes then being touted around by the publisher’s compatriots, but unified Germany arrived too late on the scene to develop much in the way of a formal empire, and what she had grabbed had largely been lost in 1919; the evils of empire was a useful stick for Nazi propagandists.

On an entirely different note, here’s a striking cover for the 1940 edition of Motor Runs from Bombay, published by The Times of India Press in Bombay. These include routes suitable for the monsoon season (if you’ve ever experienced an Indian monsoon you’ll appreciate why that might be handy).

Stanley Jepson also wrote on big game hunters (“well-known shikaris”) and published a travelogue on the overland route to India. On the basis of the titles alone one might be tempted to dismiss him without reading further. However, he was an enthusiastic film-maker (here is a film he wrote and produced: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/1332) and as editor of the popular Illustrated Weekly of India he seems to have encouraged young photojournalists such as T.S. Satyan and Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first woman press photographer, who died earlier this year. Note to self to find out more.

And to close, a distinctly Death on the Nile era map of Cairo by Alexander Nicohosoff, published in Alexandria in the mid 1930s:

In my mind it is poking out of the linen pocket of a tourist on a Nile steamer.

Hollar's Hull: the original copper plate.

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:23:00 +0000

I’m often asked how maps were printed in the hand-press period. And the (short) answer is that that between the late fifteenth and the early nineteenth-centuries, the finest results were obtained by taking impressions, one at a time, from etched and/or engraved metal plates, which were usually made of copper. The next question, sometimes, is to ask me if there is anything to stop people using these plates to turn out facsimiles today.

There is plenty one can say about early paper stocks and original hand-colour, but the shortest answer (again) is that very few original copper-plates have come down to us. Copper (then, as now) was a valuable raw material. There were very few incentives not to melt down and re-use plates which were worn or carried out-of-date information. Some copper plates had long lives, but once their commercial usefulness was over, if even ‘antiquarian’ interest was exhausted, they went into the melting pot.

But every now and again there is an exception.

Bohemian artist and etcher Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) was probably the greatest exponent of his craft active in mid seventeenth-century England. He arrived in London in 1636, was a Royalist during the Civil Wars and took temporary refuge in Antwerp, but he returned to London in 1650, and following the Restoration he was appointed ‘Scenographer or designer of Prospects to the King’. He died in penury, “owning little more than his bed and a few pots and pans” (Worms/Baynton-Williams Dictionary of Map Engravers, Rare Book Society 2011; NB, if you are a librarian, collector or dealer and don’t have this book by now, shame on you). If you haven’t guessed by now, it is one of Hollar’s plates, his map of Kingston-upon-Hull, engraved c. 1642, which I have just purchased.

W. Hollar fecit, his signature.

The scholarly importance of the plate lies in the clues it might offer us about Hollar’s working techniques. I suspect that there is much work to be done on that score. But there is also a thrill in handling the skilfully worked metal which Hollar created with his own hands 370 years ago, the very plate which each and every subsequent impression was pulled from, the same plate which sat in the shops of Robert Sayer and Robert Laurie and James Whittle. There is something of the relic hunter in us all, perhaps! But before considering the transmission of the plate in detail, here it is in its entirety:

In the upper part of the plate is a view of the city and its fortifications taken from the Humber; there is an inset map of the general environs, and Hollar’s own signature can be seen bottom centre, below the town plan itself. All delicately etched and, of course, everything is reversed. Working with acid must have been second nature to a seasoned professional like Hollar, and mirror writing something he could do in his sleep, but the workmanship of a plate like this demands enormous respect from a layman like me.

Very few of Hollar’s original plates are known to have survived. Richard Pennington attempts a census in his Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar (CUP 1982, p. lii). Hollar produced numerous maps but, leaving this plate of Hull aside, no others are listed - although there are a handful of topographical views. Hollar’s famous prospect of London before and after the Great Fire would be among the most impressive, but although Pennington was aware that it had surfaced in the London trade, its current whereabouts were unknown to him. This then, could be a unique surviving example of a cartographic copperplate in Hollar’s hand.

The map forms item 984 in Pennington’s Catalogue; in terms of the transmission of the plate, Pennington notes that the map was still being offered in the late eighteenth-century, appearing in printseller Robert Sayer’s catalogue of 1766 and in Laurie & Whittle’s of 1795. Also in the 1790’s an entirely new plate, following Hollar’s map, was engraved by Isaac Taylor (1759-1829 - being the second of the two Isaacs in Worms/Baynton-Williams) which was used to illustrate John Tickell’s The History of the town and country of Kingston-upon-Hull. However, the original copperplate is known to have survived: it still existed in 1933, when it was in the possession of Hull printing firm Richard Johnson & Sons. And, if I’m right, I’m looking at it now.

UPDATE, November 8: Really excellent news. The plate has found a permanent home in the national map collection at the British Library - which is where such a unique and potentially illuminating fragment of British cartographic history really belongs. Pinda and I carried it over this morning, and rare maps curator Tom Harper and colleagues were genuinely thrilled. From now on it will be available for anyone who is researching Hollar (and I can visit it myself) and Tom tells me that after cleaning (I didn’t get out the duraglit …) it may be displayed to the public in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, which houses a permanent display of the treasures of the British Library. The rediscovery of the plate may also be in time for inclusion in Simon Turner’s updated edition of Pennington.

UPDATE: March 2 2013: thanks to Tom Harper and the professional photographers at the BL, this image of the printing plate, a vast improvement on my own:

Finger marks more in evidence but far less glare …

"They cut his throat from ear to ear" ... Crime maps.

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:47:00 +0000

“They cut his throat from ear to ear, his head they battered in; his name was Mr William Weare, who dwelt at Lyon’s Inn.” This well-enough known fragment of doggerel has been inscribed in an early hand at the back of one of my Chelsea bookfair purchases, an 1824 first edition of George Henry Jones’ Account of the Murder of Mr William Weare:

It’s a nice book, uncut in its original boards, with 8 pages of publisher’s advertisements at the front - always of interest. The murder itself caused a sensation. It exposed the seamier side of late Georgian England, an underworld of gambling and amateur boxing. Weare was brutally murdered by three fellow gamblers in a dispute over money, and his body was dumped in a nearby pond. John Thurtell, the ringleader, was hanged; one accomplice, William Probert, was pardoned after turning King’s Evidence, but was also hanged a couple of years later after stealing a horse. The third man present, John Hunt, was transported to Australia, where in time he raised a family and became a police constable. What attracted me to the book, though, were the maps:

Dated December 1st 1823, this map of the immediate environs of Probert’s house at Gill’s Hill near Radlett, where the murder took place, is a very early example of a lithographed map by Charles Hullmandel. Hullmandel’s seminal treatise The Art of Drawing on Stone was published in 1824, and he became the foremost lithographer of the period, responsible for the printing of Edward Lear’s glorious parrots (and many of his landscapes) and most of John Gould’s birds.

It reminds of nothing so much as the crime maps in golden age detective novels. I recently treated myself to a re-reading of Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors and was using her map to pick my way around the imagined landscape of Fenchurch St Paul, and the plan of the parish church where much of the action takes place. There are innumerable examples of these fictional maps to pick from, possibly drawing inspiration from a genre of maps illustrating real crimes, such as this one. Hullmandel’s map identifies the place where the murder was committed, the spot where a witness heard the report of a pistol and the pond where the body was found. There is also a plan of Gill’s Hill cottage and grounds, identifying the pond in which the body was first concealed and even the location of the sofa where one of the murderers passed a couple of nights after the event:

And a final note on provenance, as the book had a rather nice contemporary ownership inscription dated February 1824:

Maria Fawkes (1798-1854) of Farnley Hall, near Otley, Yorkshire, had recently married General Sir Edward Barnes, a veteran of the Peninsula and Waterloo, who took up his post as Governor of Ceylon in this year. According to one online source it was a whirlwind romance, lasting just three weeks, and the general idolised her. The house still exists, in public ownership.

UPDATE: 15 November. Thanks to Francis Herbert for drawing my attention to Tony Campbell’s article on Rowland Hill’s 1817 murder map, concerning the murder of Mary Ashford: http://www.maphistory.info/murdermap.html

The Weare murder map, above, seems to have been of general interest - produced for contemporaries who were trying to visualise the scene and, potentially, for those going on a tour of the site (these went on for some years: Walter Scott followed the Weare murder trail in the later 1820s, an incident featured in Judith Flanders’ The Invention of Murder, HarperPress 2011). However, Tony Campbell suggests that Hill’s map was potentially ‘the first exercise in forensic cartography’. The route taken by the accused man was instrumental in securing his acquittal, on appeal.

A devotional map of Saint Barbara's island

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:37:20 +0100

I’ve never seen a map quite like this before. It’s on a small vellum leaf (13.5 x 8.5 cms) which has been pierced with great intricacy to create a lace-like effect; the hand is eighteenth-century and southern European, possibly Spanish. Saint Barbara watches over her island: a fanciful depiction of the coastline forms a cartouche around her name.

As the leaf is now separated from the rest of the book it is difficult to say much more with certainty, but it could well have formed the frontispiece of a little prayer book, perhaps belonging to someone with the given name Barbara, who would have celebrated her name day on the saint’s feast day. It seems a little delicate to have belonged to an artilleryman or engineer - Barbara is the patron saint of anyone who works with explosives - but that is just a guess. It seems unlikely to me that it formed part of a complete isolaria or island book - though it’s a lovely thought. Here’s the map:

Santa Barbara is the smallest and most southerly of the Channel Islands, the archipelago off the Californian coast, just west of Los Angeles. It was named in 1602 by the Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino, who reached the island on the saint’s feast day, December 4th. The map bears little relation to the actual coastline of Santa Barbara as we know it today, but that isn’t at all unreasonable. It is a tiny island, and if our eighteenth-century artist had access to a map of the region at all, Santa Barbara is unlikely to have been depicted with any degree of accuracy. I do get a sense that the artist had seen other maps or charts with small islands on them - the style is quite distinctive. And perhaps there was a genuine connection between the family that commissioned the work and the sea. Again, one can only speculate. This is a map which raises more questions than it answers.

A true original: A Comic Map of Europe, 1854.

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 19:03:00 +0100

In previous posts I’ve mentioned that there was an early flowering of cartoon and satirical maps during the Crimean War, but they rarely turn up and so I was delighted to acquire this example:

“Done by T.O.” which I think we can reveal with some certainty to be Thomas Onwhyn, and published by Rock Brothers and Payne in 1854, this Comic Map of the Seat of War is among the earliest satirical maps of Europe; certainly the earliest I’m aware of. Mind you, all the elements one finds in later maps by Fred Rose and his successors seem to be in place already, including the bad puns. The Caucasus become ‘Cork as us mountains’ with stoppered summits; the up-ended bottle clutched by the Turkish Turkey is labelled ‘the Sublime Port[e]’; Malta is represented by a foaming tankard of ale - ie malt.

Some references are vaguely historical or just plain whimsical, but without particular reference to the Crimean conflict. So, for example, Elba appears as Napoleon’s famous bicorne and Tunis is a banjo-playing lioness in hareem trousers and curly-toed slippers. Don’t ask me why. For the most part the imagery is carefully considered and entirely relevant. Neutral Italy is dismissed as a dog of indeterminate breed wearing a papal crown, and running scared (eyes swivelled behind) because a battered kettle -Sicily, possibly a neat reference to Mount Etna - has been tied to its tail.

National beasts are much in evidence: the British lion; the imperial eagle of Napoleon III’s Second Empire; a rather dopey Russian bear, wielding a knout knotted with skulls and labelled ‘despotism’, ‘bigotry’, cruelty’, ‘slavery’, ‘ignorance’ and ‘oppression’ and other choice terms. Prussia, on the other hand, becomes a vacillating weathervane, unsure which side to support (if either). Poland is manacled, her very name spelled out in bones.

There is an optimistic early reference to the Baltic campaign. An Anglo-French fleet was dispatched in April 1854, and our map was printed in May. The fleet is helped on its way by Danish bellows, followed by a puff of breath from Stockholm, carrying the words ‘Go it Charley’. The tiny British admiral in the leading vessel, declaring ‘I’ll give him a flea in his ear’, is probably meant to be Charles Napier. It was the largest fleet assembled by the Admiralty since the Napoleonic Wars, and it achieved remarkably little. Public attention at the time - and public memory since - was mostly focussed on what happened in the Crimea.

In May 1854 most of that lay in the future. It was not until the autumn that Russian withdrawal from the Danubian Principalities led the Allies to search for something else to do with the armies which had been transported to the region with such great trouble and expense and blowing of trumpets. However, the Allied Black Sea fleet was already operational, and it is shown here clipping the Russian Bear’s claws around the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol.

The title and scale are worthy of note. The scale is a pair of scales, the ‘balance of power’, with the Russian bear outweighed by the combination of French cockerel, Turkeys, and British lion. The lettering ‘seat of war’ is constructed from soldiers of all the belligerent nations.

None of the scanty auction records or institutional catalogue entries which I have located credit a particular artist. However, the signature “done by T.O.” appears in Asiatic Turkey, in the bottom right hand corner of the map. An entertaining trawl with my friend Angus O’Neill through Bryant & Heneage’s Dictionary of British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Scolar, 1994) and Houfe’s Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators (ACC 1996) turned up Onwhyn as the most likely suspect. Right place, right time, “with an eye for the comic”. Not conclusive in itself, but a reminder of why I keep a proper reference library: googling ‘T.O.’ would get you nowhere. Houfe’s ODNB entry for Onwhyn is the clincher: Onwyhn signed himself T.O. and was associated with “shadowy publishers such as Rock Bros and Payne”. This was supported by a search on Worldcat, which showed that Onwhyn produced work for the firm on either side of 1854, and one can also look at images of other work by the artist; stylistically, it’s spot on.

According to ODNB, Onwyhn was born in Clerkenwell, son of a bookseller and newsagent. He was responsible for a set of illustrations for a pirated edition of Pickwick (of ‘singular vileness’ according to Dickens) and in Houfe’s opinion, Onwhyn’s “most lasting contribution was to the ephemeral end of the book trade in the 1840s and 1850s, illustrating the comic side of everyday life”. There wasn’t a living to be made, and he spent the last twenty to thirty years of his life as a newsagent, taking up his father’s profession.

So, it seems we have Thomas Onwhyn to thank for inspiring a whole genre of similar maps. His name should be up there with Fred Rose. It is difficult to gauge the popularity or reach of the map, but a Belgian derivative exists, published in Brussels by Louis Mols-Marchal: http://belgica.kbr.be/fr/test/cp12270Plus_fr.html

Some of the imagery is repeated in later maps, which may suggest a certain awareness or continuity following on from this particular work. Discussing the relationship between the work of William Mecham and Lillie Tennant in an earlier post I was able to demonstrate that artists in this genre were well aware of both their contemporaries and predecessors: http://timbryars.tumblr.com/post/9290475824/europe-as-a-lady-england-as-george-the-dragon

If you take a look at Louis Raemakers’ 1915 map you will see that he, like our anonymous mid-nineteenth century Englishman, has shown Gibraltar as a bulldog. And in 1914 Karl Lehmann-Dumont portrayed a Russian bear next to a knout-wielding lout. My post on WW1 satirical maps is here: http://timbryars.tumblr.com/post/14824179535/satirical-maps-of-the-great-war-1914-1915 Unfortunately the reliance on broad stereotypes which made all these maps so appealing to contemporaries makes it difficult for us to assign specific sources with confidence, but there’s no doubting that this Crimean map was the start of something new.

Angus O'Neill writes ...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 16:23:00 +0100

My first guest on this blog is Angus O’Neill (Omega Bookshop). This is a delightful tale of books and booksellers, and of local interest for me as it all took place a few yards from my shop. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and be sure to click on the link at the end for the denouement, if you haven’t guessed already!

For five years I was a shopkeeper. This was longer than my enemies (and friends) expected. Even the pleasant surroundings of Cecil Court were powerless to detain me any longer; my accountant also had views on the subject, and I had no hesitation in assigning my lease as soon as two reliable people could be found to take it on. Now I work from home, and from a Dickensian dungeon (although Dickens would have approved of the spacious Peabody flats above it): but, for a few months, delusions of grandeur remained, and I rented an Office.

It was a temporary arrangement, and the landlords were good to me. They were refurbishing the premises, which were just around the corner at 30 Charing Cross Road, a tall building dating (I suppose) from around 1910. It was part of the deal that I would move from floor to floor as the work progressed: this led to some unusual expedients, such as enormous lengths of telephone extension cable, but I had a capable assistant. The rooms were light and pleasant, and it was not even very expensive (the rent, that is, not the rates). Although the ground floor has long been occupied by a delicatessen to whose charms I seem to be (uniquely) immune, there was something about the spirit of the place which seemed to welcome books and booksellers. Rational in many respects, I have often been receptive to what is now termed ‘psychogeography’, and something about this spot was oddly appealing.

It didn’t last. One of those sudden shortages of London office space resulted in the landlord receiving a substantial offer for the lease on the whole building, and - after a settlement more generous than our agreement strictly called for - I packed my books and left. It had been an agreeable few months, but it was over.

Years later, however, I found a reference to the building - or, rather, a previous building on the site - which seemed to me to be not entirely without interest for the students of local book trade history and, indeed, the byways of Victorian literature. The story is a simple enough one: the shop, before the Charing Cross Road was redeveloped, had once been a bookshop, started by a German immigrant who also engaged in publishing. One of the works produced under his imprint would have looked slight by any standards: a rich customer, with time on his hands, had produced (at his own expense, not that of the bookseller) some 250 copies of his anonymous translation of a number of ‘oriental’ verses found in the library of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Unsurprisingly, these had not sold well (both author and title were close to unpronounceable) and, within a couple of years, they were relegated to the ‘penny box’ outside what was then no. 16, Castle Street. Even at that price, trade in the pamphlets was not initially brisk: but the poems were enjoyed by a few customers, among them two young Irishmen, a philologist named Whitley Stokes and a translator called John Ormsby. They gave copies to some of their literary friends, and the work gradually acquired a modest succès d’estime: so much so, in fact, that within seven years the bookseller/publisher had put the price of the pamphlet up to an altogether more bullish three shillings and sixpence.

In a more rationally organised parallel universe, all these stories would have ended there. The German immigrant - who had started his business with a capital of only £70, not a substantial sum even at the time - would have retired into obscurity, commemorated perhaps by a handful of lightweight catalogues and forgotten publications; his name would have survived as a footnote to the history of Marx and Engels, for whose Neue Rheinische Zeitung he was, briefly and improbably, the English correspondent, but that is about all. As for the idea that the Persian poetry would ever have a wider appeal… well, what would be the chances of that?

And yet, and yet… Happily, not everything in life turns out as predicted by the level-headed: http://tinyurl.com/7pyyfnp .

Map cover art

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:03:00 +0100

Have you ever bought a map for its cover? I’m not immune to vintage marketing, and I’ve bought one or two really dull maps because the cover design was simply irresistible. There are one or two map series with uniform (and uniformly tedious) cover art, but often just as much thought went into the design of the cover as into, say, the design of dustwrappers or paperback cover art. I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to this topic, but here’s just a taste.

Cover art has a long history. Walker’s New Geographical Game exhibiting a tour through Europe was published in 1810 by William Darton and his son Thomas. The cover shows Europeans - including, of course, an Ottoman Turk - seated on crates and barrels (trade) in front of a strategically placed rock (for the title; a bit of foliage spilling over, all quite wild and romantic) and with ships in the background. The date of engraving is given as September 1809, but the engraver himself remains anonymous. Surveyor Thomas Dix’s map of Bedfordshire, published in 1830 by William Darton (working on his own again), has a fine printed label on the slipcase: an engraved template derived from the royal coat of arms which could be overprinted in red with the name of the correct county. It would do for the whole series.

By the mid nineteenth-century cover designs were more likely to be blocked in gilt directly onto cloth covers, rather than appearing on separately applied paper labels. On the left is an 1856 example of A & C Black’s Road and Railway Travelling Map of England, with steam engine and mail coach (and price) worked into the design. On the right is a locally published map of Cornwall, of similar vintage, engraved by W.W. Rundell of Falmouth and published by W. Wood, Devonport; St Michael’s Mount appears on the cover.

Paper covers/labels seem to have made a come-back later in the century - both of these county maps date from the 1880s. Again, they are standard cover desgns (I can just about envisage someone riding a penny farthing in Bedfordshire, but there’s precious little mountain walking to be had in those parts).

I rather like these turn of the century maps by G.W. Bacon. No solitary cyclists here. A great way to meet the opposite sex, but beware of danger hills.

This is an 1895 edition of J.F. Bennet’s Map and ABC Guide to the River Thames (I have had 1880’s editions with the same artwork). A sturdy gentleman in striped jersey is gallantly rowing two ladies with parasols. Despite the gender differences, this is real Three Men in a Boat stuff: just the sort of map a Harris or a George might have the forethought to purchase, with details of locks, fishing rights, inns and train fares, as well a general places of interest.

This is an 1898 issue of the District Railway Map of London (1st state of the 6th edition). Not really convenient for commuters, it’s a huge folding map with the new underground railways (completed, under construction and proposed) overprinted on a detailed street plan of the capital. The cover shows places of interest (the Monument, Cleopatra’s Needle etc) but I particularly like the steam engine emerging from a tunnel beneath the legend ‘Time is Money’. One could avoid the congested streets above - a major draw - though straplines like this are conspicuously absent from modern TfL advertising. Early underground locomotives were indeed steam, and I have read early c.20 accounts by people who resented electrification because they missed the smoke and sparks - must have been truly alarming in a confined space.

The Ordnance Survey art is particularly well documented (see John Paddy Brown, Map Cover Art, OS, 1991), and already collected in its own right. These, OS and AA, date to the 1920s and actually show maps in use; all three OS covers are by Ellis Martin:

The map of the Lake District shows Derwentwater from Skiddaw.

On the left are 1930s British railway maps, LNER and LMS, by Frank Newbould and ‘Bell’ respectively, and by way of contrast the map on the right is from 1940s L.A. A bit late for Metropolis, but still very Art Deco, and American Art Deco at that. It makes me start thinking of Raymond Chandler novels rather than P.G. Wodehouse (although, famously, they both went to Dulwich College).

And finally (for now), a cover from British Mandate-era Jersualem, drawn by F.T. Treitel and published by the Commercial Press c. 1942. Possibly one of the most ingenious covers we’ve looked at so far.

London Map Fair 2012

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 14:17:00 +0100

This year’s London Map Fair took place at the Royal Geographical Society on June 16th and 17th. If you follow my Tweets and Facebook ramblings (or spotted my name on the www.londonmapfairs.com website) you’ll know that I’m one of fair organisers, along with fellow mapsellers Massimo de Martini and Rainer Voigt. It’s the largest specialist map fair in Europe, and on those two days in June there isn’t another place on earth where one could find so many original antique maps gathered for sale under one roof. The RGS has the ideal roof too, with distinguished explorers from Cook to Burton keeping a watchful eye from the canvasses which line the walls. I normally blog about the antique maps themselves rather than the trade, but now that the dust is starting to settle (and I’m finally catching up on lost sleep) I thought a quick round-up of this year’s fair might be of interest. If you missed it this year, come next time.

Excellent press coverage contributed to a surge in visitor numbers, which were up by an astonishing 38%. The fair has never been so busy, and although average sales were slightly down on last year (hardly surprising), the general public accounted for 39% of the take and softened the effect of cautious buying by the trade.

Calm before the opening. Kevin primed and ready for the first wave …

… which looked something like this. One of the best things about the fair in its current location is that every year I’ve been able to sell someone their first map. It’s the same logic behind having a ground floor shop. Maps are intrinsically interesting - really - but it’s hard to get a sense of what’s really out there through online searches alone, and nothing beats face-to-face conversations with people who know their onions, and know them with a passion. As well as a concentration of maps, the fair is a concentration of expertise: exhibitors and visiting trade, curators and collectors from all corners of the world. An ideal place to dip a toe in the water.

The fair was again full to capacity with 37 leading international dealers and three other related stands. We were pleased to provide a stand to IMCoS, as always, and for the first time the RGS itself had a presence, and a special map fair membership offer.

The lecture on London’s lost or (more properly) hidden rivers by our guest speaker Stephen Myers was deservedly well attended, as was the usual ‘House’ tour of the RGS itself and the series of informal talks on beginning a map collection by dealer and author Ashley Baynton-Williams, an innovation which we hope to repeat.

In lieu of anything better, here’s a really bad photo of a cross section of the audience, waiting for Stephen’s talk to begin. Stephen is a professional water engineer, and he has used his technical expertise to inform his reading of archaeological and literary source material - including maps - as well as carrying out his own on-site surveys. We heard some remarkable new insights into the original courses of London’s rivers (Tyburn, Fleet etc) and their role in the development of the city. He has identified a completely new, western branch of the Walbrook and, in the archives of the Charterhouse, he located the original pipeline diagram made by the mediaeval Cistercian monks who drained it; their need for fresh water (having built their monastery on a plague pit) had far reaching consequences, including the draining of the marsh north of Moorgate. Buy his book, ‘Walking on Water’; I read it cover-to-cover.

Many exhibitors commented on the number of younger people at the fair, often buying their first map or maps. Articles in the Financial Times, Observer and The Times undoubtedly helped to raise awareness of the fair. We had overseas coverage in periodicals such as the Italian Vanity Fair, a spot on Monocle Radio and coverage in online journals such as Fine Books Magazine, but perhaps the most noticeable aspect of the online activity were the numbers of private individuals, unconnected with the fair, who were sharing plans to visit the fair and details of their purchases on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Heads down, browsing, by Garwood & Voigt’s stand.

The next London Map fair is scheduled to take place on the weekend of 8-9 June 2013. As always there will be thousands of maps, charts, plans, atlases and globes, printed between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, covering all regions of the world and priced to suit all pockets, from £10 to £100,000; one still doesn’t have to be among the super-rich to start a collection, which is why there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ map collector. Come along.

Words can’t express my relief that the rain held off. Here’s a rare early c.19 library globe being loaded up after the fair. You see why I was worried.

ABA President Laurence Worms wrote a glowing account from a vsitor’s perspective on his President on Safari blog:

http://ashrarebooks.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/the-ducking-stool/

Nate Pedersen wrote for Fine Books Magazine:

http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine_books_blog/2012/06/the-london-map-fair.phtml

Nick Crane for the Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b4b0213a-a8a9-11e1-a747-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1wdSGqEMO

We also had a piece by Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy in the Observer:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/gallery/2012/jun/10/antique-maps-fair-royal-geographic?CMP=twt_gu

There was also a piece by Huon Mallalieu in the Times; one would need to subsscribe to read it, but it’s easy to find.

The Dollar Octopus, 1942

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 16:57:00 +0100

High time for another cartographic cephalopod. This one by Dutch artist Louis Emile Manche (1908-82) arrived in the shop just too late for this year’s London Map Fair, but I’m still pleased to have located an original example.

Compare and contrast with Pat Keely’s Japanese octopus, made to boost morale among the Free Dutch in 1944, which I blogged about last December: http://timbryars.tumblr.com/post/14821537264/the-indies-must-be-free-japan-is-cast-as-an-especially

Lou Manche designed a number of posters for the NSB (Dutch National Socialist party) and his octopus carries a pro-Axis message. In the immediate postwar period Manche found himself interned with other Dutch collaborators in Kamp Vught, the former concentration camp.

A dollar symbol represents America’s financial power, and the tentacles bear the dates of American expansion, formal and informal, from the Mexican-American War onwards. The tentacle linking the US with the Philippines (dated 1898 for the Spanish-American War) has already been severed by a samurai sword, bearing the rising sun on its grip. Japanese aircraft menace the west coast, and indeed the only air raid on US soil (by a single aircraft) took place in September 1942. Submarines, both Japanese and German, were more of a problem. The German U-boat menace to US shipping off the east coast was real and is well-documented.

There are at least two settings of the text. This version casts the US as an imperialist power, accusing it of sheltering behind the Monroe Doctrine (which sought to exlude European powers from expanding/regaining colonies in the Americas) when convenient, but actually obeying the law of the jungle, and planting the US flag wherever ‘the Yankees’ feel like it. That deals with the tentacles. The US is also accused of fighting with dollars, not bullets, and profiting from European wars; the dollar is at the heart of the last paragraph: ‘the gold of the international plutocracy [a phrase used here with anti-semitic connotations], concentrated in Fort Knox, is besieged by the irresistible armies of the young [ie Axis] nations, by the armies of the workers’.

The poster was approved by the Propaganda Section of the Department for People’s Information and the Arts, located in Den Haag. A Dutch friend tells me that Dutch artists were required to sign a document declaring allegiance to the fascist regime. Many refused, and many were interned for the duration in Kamp Vught; the artists who signed, like Manche, exchanged places with them at the end of the war.

Break out the bunting!

Sat, 26 May 2012 17:15:00 +0100

Republicans should look away now (unless a fondness for bunting and street parties outweighs any qualms you may have; if that’s the case, you can still skip to the end of the post, and I’ll throw in a map with republican connotations just for you).

As this is the first Diamond Jubilee in 115 years I can hardly let it pass without making a special royal window. Here are a few of the items I’ll be including.

This is Macdonald Gill’s 1937 map of the Coronation procession of the Queen’s father, George VI. This is from the deluxe edition of the souvenir programme, picked out in gold:

The programme (and Gill’s map) appeared in three forms: a miniature edition; a full-size but basic edition for 1 shilling, and a deluxe edition at 2/6, complete with tassels.

I also have the 1937 Coronation edition of the A1 Atlas, a forerunner of the A-Z, in lovely condition. The AA’s 1953 Coronation Day map contains handy advice for motorists on road closures (most of central London … it’s nothing new) and how to apply for windscreen labels and other permits.

Here is the Daily Telegraph’s souvenir map for the present Queen’s 1947 ‘austerity’ wedding. Drawn by P. Zadwill after N.V. Gray, it’s a pictorial map of London which, stylistically, owes more than a nod to Gill:

Skipping ahead to 1953 and the Coronation itself, here’s the official London Transport map of the processional route:

And this is a striking poster advertising the Coronation Cruise on board the ‘Green Goddess’, the green-liveried Cunard liner RMS Caronia:

Named by the present Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, the Caronia made her maiden transatlantic voyage in 1949. She was a state-of-the-art vessel, fitted out with en suite bathrooms and an open air swimming pool, but the golden age of liner travel (as opposed to cruising) was all but over, thanks to competition from a new generation of long haul jet airliners. After a decade in service the Caronia was refitted as a cruise ship, and within a quarter century of her launch she was broken up for scrap.

Only the most prescient passengers might have guessed at that in 1953. The Coronation Cruise seems to have been aimed at the American market. After a luxurious European cruise (see map …) the ship docked in Southampton where she became a floating hotel for the duration of the Coronation. On the day itself, her 500 passengers were conveyed by specially chartered Pullman train to London, where seats had been reserved for them at the specially built viewing stand at Apsley House. There’s more information here: http://bit.ly/LRFqxn

The language of the map is interesting. The Anglo-American flags make perfect sense in context. The faintly baroque dolphins, flying fish and scallop shell all seem very ‘new Elizabethan’, and the depiction of the Spanish Armada clinches the reference, harking back to the perceived glories of the first Elizabeth’s reign - some swashbuckling fun after all that austerity. Unlike the other maps we’ve looked at here, which were made to inform and entertain pretty much anyone attending these events, this one was aimed at a wealthy few; acknowledging that, I still find it a joyful, optimistic map.

However, if all this pageantry is too much for you, here is something entirely different, John Speed’s map of Scotland:

When originally engraved c. 1610 the decorative border featured James I and VI and his family; during the interregnum the royals were burnished from the plate, usurped by an entirely plebian ‘Scotch man’ and woman, and ‘Highland man’ and woman, never to be restored (unlike James’s grandson, Charles II …) Perhaps it is more surprising that the royal arms remained undisturbed on the rest of Speed’s county maps. The tradition dates back to Saxton’s series of English county maps in the 1570s, the first national atlas of any country. Elizabeth I contributed towards the engraving of the plates, and the appearance of her arms has none-too-subtle undertones of royal authority and control.

And here’s the window itself:

Battles of the Atlantic, 1914 and 1943

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:07:00 +0100

The Atlantic was a key theatre in both world wars. The German aims were the same in 1914 and 1939: to sever Britain’s supply lines from North America without bringing a neutral United States into the war. These propaganda maps cover the two campaigns, from a German and British perspective.

In 1914 submarine warfare had been a potential menace for half a century (really - C.S.S. H.L. Hunley, 1864), but was still untried on a large-scale. The new weapon was greatly feared and the notion of civilian merchantmen and liners being sunk without warning by an unseen enemy was widely regarded as barbaric. The Germans had to tread carefully, but British countermeasures (such as Q-Ships) made surfacing, and allowing passengers and crew to take to the boats before sinking their vessel, extremely hazardous. The first foray into unrestricted submarine warfare culminated in the sinking of the Lusitania - a propaganda disaster - and the Germans reverted to cruiser rules. In 1915 their calculations were correct: there simply weren’t enough U-boats to enforce a blockade and starve Britain into submission before the U.S. could enter the war. Campaigns such as this one, encouraging soldiers of the German Third Army to buy war bonds to expand the U-boat fleet, sought to change the balance:

The poster is by German artist F.W. Kleurs (1878-1956), published in Mainz, and it’s a simple but powerful image. An impenetrable ring of U-boats strangles the British Isles. I like the way that the white cliffs of Dover have been extended around the whole coastline, and the star-shaped fortifications surrounding the British cities makes them look suitably militaristic and menacing. By 1917 the U-boat fleet had more than doubled; Germany was starving, and the German High Command calucated that if they acted quickly they could knock Britain out of the war before U.S. intervention could be decisive, even if America did choose to enter the war. Unrestricted submarine warfare resumed in January 1917. The German gamble failed: as predicted the U-boat campaign was a decisive factor in drawing America into the war, but (eventually) the convoy system provided adequate protection and the supply lines held up. There was no swift knockout blow.

The German Kriegsmarine of the Second World War wrestled with similar problems a generation later. This 1943 British propaganda poster, The Battle of the Atlantic, by Frederick Donald Blake (1908-97) is a reasonably well known image, but one generally encounters the 1943/44 editions with English text. However, Blake’s posters were part of a series produced for distribution abroad in various languages including French, Dutch, Arabic and - as here - Portuguese, bringing the Allied message to the widest possible audience.

Like Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s right-wing Estado Novo Portugal remained neutral (although Lisbon was a hotbed of intrigue and espionage). Blake’s message for any wavering Portuguese is pretty forthright, the very antithesis of the first poster we looked at. Britain is, effectively, Orwell’s Airstrip One: nothing but factories, shipyards and gigantic concrete runways. Far from being enclosed by a U-boat ring of steel, waves of Allied aircraft radiate out, and with air supremacy comes protection for the convoys steaming in from North America and those steaming out, the Arctic Convoys bound for the USSR, and convoys bound for the Mediterranean. In the mid Atlantic U-boats are scattered and destroyed:

And Fortress Europe is under constant attack, with aircraft and parachute mines battering the strategic targets such as railways, docks and submarine pens:

As propaganda, Blake’s 1943 poster isn’t necessarily constrained by reality, but successful propaganda often manipulates a perceived truth, and the Battle of the Atlantic really had turned decisively in the Allies’ favour in the Spring of that year. In March 1943 the U-boat wolf packs came as close as they ever did to cutting Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, and supplies of fuel and other vital resources reached critical levels. The situation was reversed within two months: Allied resources were freed from other theatres, and new long-range aircraft - which could now be fitted with a new sea-scanning radar and airborne depth-charges - closed the mid-Atlantic gap. The wolf packs were harried out of existence, and losses to Allied shipping were negligible in comparison with what had gone before. In May (dubbed ‘Black May’ by the U-boat crews) the Germans lost 34 U-Boats in the Atlantic - an unsustainable one submarine for each Allied ship sunk. One lucky convoy (SC 130) escaped entirely unscathed, while five of the attacking U-boats were destroyed. Dönitz conceded defeat. One-sided as Blake’s vision is, it reflects the changed strategic situation.

The artist, Blake, trained at Camberwell School of Art but had been working as an architectural draughtsman. His stint as a war artist for the Ministry of Information opened new doors for him postwar, as a successful commercial artist and respected painter.

The first of these maps was a recent purchase from my friend Ken Fuller of Marchpane (he specialises in children’s and illustrated books but - like most of us - he has a much broader range of interests which are reflected in his stock). The map by Blake came from Portugal, and presumably it had been there since the 1940s. I’ve yet to see any of the series with Arabic or Persian text, but the Portuguese climate (actual and political) has probably been more conducive to preservation.

UPDATE: Nov 2012. Recently purchased the version with Arabic text:

My thanks to Ali Ansari and colleagues at St Andrews. I wondered if the text varied from the original, or was slanted in an particular direction, but it is apparently a faithful rendition of the English:

“A ceaseless battle is raging in the Atlantic. The Axis U-boats’ intention is too isolate and starve Britain. But as the U-boat offensive mounts so too to Britain’s protective measures. More and more vessels are safeguarding convoys. The U-boat’s Atlantic Bases are being pounded by the Allied Air Forces and the entrances to their harbours are being mined from the air. The factories where they are built are being crippled by bombs. All these measures enabled Mr Churchill to say, when reviewing the U-boat campaign in May 1943: “Our killings of the U-boats … greatly exceeded all previous experience and the last three months, and particularly the last three weeks, have yielded record results”.

The View from Japan, 1904

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:09:00 +0000

A very scarce satirical map, and one which I anticipate will be passing through my hands pretty quickly. However, as temporary custodian I can’t resist sharing it. It’s a delight.

Cartoon or satirical world maps are an unusual form in general, and only one institutional example of this particular map has been located (the Bodleian Library has a copy, part of the John Johnson collection of ephemera). ‘NEW COMICAL ATLAS - WHAT THE ANIMALS OF THE WORLD SAY’ by Kamijo Yomotaro was published in Tokyo in June 1904, a few months into the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. It was the first victory of an Asian power over a European in modern times. Russia suffered a series of humiliating defeats on land and sea (the Admiralty presented a lock of Nelson’s hair to the Japanese navy in recognition of the scale of their victory at Tsushima, likened to Trafalgar). The consequences were far reaching: Russian prestige was severely damaged and Japan entered the ranks of the Great Powers. And yet, many Japanese felt that the terms of the peace treaty were over-cautious, and that they had not been treated as equals. Mistrust of the West grew. That all lies in the future, so let’s see what the animals were saying in 1904.

The Chinese pig, Turkish pheasant, Hungarian hen and Persian quail are all in danger from the claws of the double-headed Russian eagle; that is, until the Japenese Golden Kite swoops to their rescue. The American tiger looks on approvingly. The explanatory text is given in English as well as Japanese (for export?) and the tiger says: “By Jove, that Golden Kite is small, but if he isn’t strong and generous! I have nothing but admiration for him”. The peace treaty was eventually signed in the US, and President Roosevelt’s mediation earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.

The British hawk is also portrayed in a positive light: “I was rather surprised at Our Chum, Golden Kite being so brave and gallant. Get at the Eagle, friend. We station ourselves at Gibraltar and at Suez, so that in spite of his audacity, Mr. Eagle can’t swoop from that direction; we are always behind you in the case of a danger. So give him a good everlasting lesson with full hands.” The French owl is dismayed at Russian weakness, and the German bear resolves to keep quiet.

The lion of British India is a magnificent beast, looking warily towards Russian expansion in central Asia (‘that avaricious Eagle better take care of what he does. If he ever put his claws on the Elephant [Tibet], I will tear him to pieces’), and the Arabian camel is a delightful touch, making excellent use of the geographical space.

Mercator's 'Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio': mapping the Northern lands.

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:04:00 +0000

Another old friend for your consideration. Mercator’s depiction of the Arctic regions and North Pole (Septentrionalium Terrarum descriptio) remains perennially popular with collectors and scholars alike. Perhaps I’m coming too late to the table for fresh analysis of the content, but few maps capture the problems faced by early cartographers quite so well. The basic configuration of the islands was not wholly original, but Mercator was the first to devote a separate copper-plate to a map of the Arctic; he had tough decisions to make when sifting evidence gathered thousands of miles from his home in Duisburg, some of which also reached back across several centuries (to the age of Arthur, if the sources were to be trusted). This is a map by one of the greatest cartographers of his own or any other age (variants of Mercator’s projection are still in use, even by the latest online street mapping services) and yet there’s a rich vein of myths and legend blended - seemingly without prejudice - among genuine discoveries. It’s so very wrong.

First issued in 1595 by Mercator’s son, Rumold, shortly after Mercator’s death; our example was printed from the second state of the plate in 1623, and it was hand-coloured at the time.

In reality there isn’t even a landmass at the Pole. But allowing for the fact that the region was largely unknown (Ross and Parry launched the modern era of Arctic exploration in the second decade of the nineteenth-century, and Peary - probably - reached it for the first time as recently as 1909) how did Mercator ever imagine it looked like this?

At the Pole itself he shows a naturally occurring magnetic (lodestone) mountain, the Rupes nigra or black rock - an ancient idea. Surrounding it is a powerful whirlpool, drawing off water from all the seas of the world and sucking it deep into the earth. The whirlpool is fed by four rivers with formidable currents (note the deltas which ought, I suppose, to be at the mouths of the rivers closest to the whirlpool, if the normal laws of geography are observed) and these rivers divide the surrounding landmass into four islands. Pygmies, four feet tall, are said to inhabit the island closest to Europe - possibly a folk memory of the people the Norse settlers of Greenland called Skraelings, the ancestors of the Inuit.

Mercator is careful to cite his sources. Unfortunately all are lost to us, their contents known chiefly from Mercator’s own summary in a letter he sent to John Dee (and from later maps, including Mercator’s own). Mercator had read Jacobus Cnoyen’s Itinerarium, a work drawing on the Res gestae Arturi britanni but principally a summary of the Inventio fortunata. The latter text was allegedly composed by an Oxford Friar in the fourteenth-century (probably not Nicholas of King’s Lynn, as Mercator supposed) who compiled a report of his travels in the far north and possibly created a map of his own. The underlying assumption was that King Arthur had sent settlers to the Arctic, and the author of the Inventio fortunata had met their descendants. It was a convenient intellectual justification for Elizabethan and Jacobean seafarers, exploring the region in search of the Northwestern and Northeastern passages to Asia.

From separate (Italian) sources we have the mythical island of Frisland, confused with Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes, but here shown south west of Iceland and wholly imaginary.

There is some excellent map-making going on here. Mercator was aware of the latest discoveries by Martin Frobisher and John Davis. And note the revisions by Hondius affecting the region north of Russia (Hondius owned Mercator’s plates by this time and made a commercial success of the Atlas. Our example is this second, revised state; to compare it with the first, here’s the Princeton copy: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/northwest-passage/mercator.htm.) The coastline of Nova Zembla has been amended and, at the centre of the map, part of the lower right-hand island of the four flanking the Pole has been burnished out altogether; a truncated coastline has been tentatively dotted back in, separating off Greenland and allowing space for new discoveries just north of (Hugh) Willoughby’s Land (another fictitious island). And yet, whatever tinkering Hondius carried out, he allowed Mercator’s basic concept to stand and continued to publish the map. He may have found errors in the detail, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary a map based on a series of lost manuscripts (even Cnoyen’s account had vanished by Hondius’ day) continued to appear in the most modern atlases.

This wasn’t just the view from Duisburg/Amsterdam. It might seem highly unlikely to us that King Arthur despatched thousands of his countrymen to the Arctic, and the garbled travel account of a mediaeval Oxford scholar seems a slender thread to trust with one’s life, but for Elizabethan/Jacobean Englishmen these were valuable precedents for their own hazardous voyages of discovery, in search of the supposed Northwestern and Northeastern Passages which are depicted with such certainty on Mercator’s map. The prize was rich enough: a fast route to China and the Indies, free from Spanish or Portuguese competition, and if Englishmen had navigated those waters before then so much the better. To modern eyes Mercator’s blend of historical, and one might even say literary sources, with reports from navigators of his own age (some more reliable than others) seems curious and archaic. We expect nothing short of total accuracy from our own maps. Early modern readers, by contrast, were accustomed to the idea of reading a map on several different levels.

Pictorial plans of London: MacDonald Gill and beyond.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:39:00 +0000

This post is something of a work in progress, so please check back now and again to see if I’ve been able to expand it. So far I’ve tried to avoid some of the most well-known maps, but in this instance there’s no excuse for not beginning with MacDonald Gill’s playful and eccentric Wonderground map of London. Apologies if you know it already, but it always repays another look:

Gill’s map was commissioned by London Transport in 1913, and was so successful that it was offered for sale to the general public the following year. The map I have here is an example of that issue: The heart of Britain’s Empire here is spread out for your view … You have not time to admire it all? Why not take a map home to pin on your wall! And of course, most purchasers took Gill’s advice and did just that, which is why it has become scarce today …

With this map Gill inspired a whole genre of comic map-making, filling his map with poems, puns and in-jokes (some bad, a few inexplicable). One needs hours to ‘admire it all’ (unscramble might be a better word). Here’s how Gill treated one of my favourite places in London, the zoo:

It’s a much more entertaining way of showing how the Underground Stations relate to surface topography than anything dreamt up previously, but the style is better suited to pleasure than business and I note that most maps of this genre focus on West London rather than the City or the East End. The blend of old and new seems typically Edwardian, summed up in this detail from the upper left corner:

The curvature of the horizon is decidedly medieval (Arts and Crafts, anyway), while the aeroplane and motorized omnibus bring us firmly into the Twentieth Century. The speech bubbles are Gill’s own.

Gill went on to create further maps for London Transport, including a series of ‘straight’ pocket Underground maps in the 1920s; he also designed the font used on headstones by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and numerous posters for bodies such as the Empire Marketing Board. I suspect that he was more commercially successful than his brother, Eric. A new carto-bibliography of his work is expected soon (following last year’s MacDonald Gill exhibition in Brighton), and in the meantime I refer you to Elisabeth Burdon’s excellent article: http://hq.abaa.org/books/antiquarian/news_fly?code=96

I’d like to devote the rest of this post to other maps which were show clear signs of being influnced by Gill’s work. This map is more blatant than most:

Published by Alexander Gross’s firm, Geographia Ltd in the 1930s, it’s unsigned.

The visual and verbal puns (the long arm of the law reaching out from Scotland Yard, the ink spilled on Fleet Street …) and historical and topographical notes are typical of Gill’s work. But it certainly isn’t. Mind you, it was popular enough for Geographia to issue it in jigsaw form:

This is the standard Geographia London Pictorial Map, published in numerous editions between the 1920s and 1950s:

Not terribly inventive, perhaps, but worth including as the early post-war editions are among the only maps to show the blitzed area in the City of London:

The area left blank on the map had almost reverted to the heathland it had been centuries before, carpeted with rosebay willowherb and ragwort. Some streets could only be identified from temporary wooden signboards. Leaving the map blank seems entirely logical - it’s surprising how few cartographers followed suit.

Here’s Leslie Bullock’s Children’s Map of London, c. 1938:

Bullock worked closely with Edinburgh publisher John Bartholomew and Son over a long period. All royalties for this map were donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital. In the margins are nursery rhyme scenes and the map is flanked by the Biblical giants Gog and Magog, long associated with London.

There are scattered quotations, but the map is not as crowded as Gill’s (I suspect Bullock lacked Gill’s talent for whimsical quippery). However, there are echoes of Gill’s work here - I doubt Bullock’s map would have existed without it. I’m also going to include Kennedy North’s 1923 British Empire Exhibition map:

North’s debt is principally calligraphic - the lettering is clearly inspired by Gill’s 1920s Underground maps - although one might also look at the bold use of colour and details such as the buses, cars and trams. Note North’s impressive attempt to reduce the Underground system to diagramatic form almost a decade before Harry Beck.

I’ve been assuming that Kennedy North is Stanley Kennedy North: artist, illustrator, picture restorer, socialist, folk dancer and general bohemian. Commercial work (e.g. for Shell Oil) seems to be signed simply ‘Kennedy North’, but it seems unlikely that there would be two similarly named artists working at the same time. If I spot a definite link I’ll update this entry. [Update May 2012: two members of the artist’s family have been in touch to confrim that this is indeed SKN; he made other maps - possibly another post to follow.]

The unusual thing about this reduced, pocket version of Kerry Lee’s poster is the way it’s folded. A customer in my shop pulled out a very similar (modern) map of London only the other day. The ‘uniquefold’ patent is dated 1948, which ties in with the reference to British Railways (nationalised in that year).

Here is an early 1950s pictorial map by Francis Chichester (aviator, yachtsman and map-maker), again in jigsaw form:

Chichester had initially bought up surplus wartime Air Ministry maps and turned them into jigsaws (possibly among the most joyless age of austerity toys ever, though I’d still like to find one). However, this one of Chichester’s original maps. Significant landmarks are shown pictorially, but there are no puns.

And finally, The Daily Telegraph Picture Map of London, probably 1950s:

Designed by Vale Studios for Geographia, it is entirely distinct from the Telegraph’s 1947 Royal Wedding map by Zadwill and Gray, which I’ve illustrated here: http://bit.ly/KDQwD5. Here’s a detail:

More to follow as I find them!

The course of true love ...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:02:10 +0000

I’m not much of a one for Valentine’s Day in the ordinary run of things, but I feel like making a special effort this year. So here are one or two whimsical ‘maps of matrimony’ - a popular nineteenth century genre which seems to have fallen by the wayside. You can make up your own mind as to whether that’s a good thing or not. Here’s a hand-drawn example:

The ragged coastline bears a passing resemblance to south western England and Wales - perhaps the ghost of a geography lesson (copying out maps was quite common in the schoolroom). At the top (north?) of the map we come first to the ‘Quicksands of Censure’ the ‘Isles of Temerity’ and the ‘United States of Agitation’ before passing through the ‘Province of Jewellers & Milliners’ and the ‘Mountains of Delay, inhabited by Lawyers’. Heading south we finally reach the ‘Port of Hymen’ which is located in the ‘Electorate of Bridesmaids’ (is it just me, or is that highly suspicious?) rather than the ‘Region of Rejoicing’. Crossing the Gulf of Matrimony and the River of Congratulation we reach … Petticoat Government.

Here’s a popular postcard on the same lines, c. 1900:

The principal tributaries of the Truelove River, the rivers Edwin and Angelina, have their sources in (respectively) Indifference Hill and Fancy Free Plateau. Once joined, they pass through Evasion Rapids, Sentimental Meadow, Separation Deep, Misery Marsh etc before emerging into Altar Bay and Honeymoon Island. Angrysire sounds best avoided …

If all this is getting a bit sugary for you, here’s French caricaturist Paul Hadol’s take on the state of love and marriage in France in 1869:

In map circles Hadol is probably best remembered for the satirical map of Europe he created on the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, but as this map prepared for weekly magazine L’Eclipse shows, it wasn’t the only time he toyed with cartographic imagery. His imaginary island is laid out in the traditional heart-shape, but on closer inspection the inhabitants prove terribly worldy. The island is split into three provinces by the rivers Absinthe, Gold Mine and Reconnaissance, which rather sets the tone.

‘Tenderness’ is a woman hurling a (full) soup tureen at her husband, and only if one can navigate La Mer Dangereuse, past the suicide rocks, can one hope to reach ‘the unknown country of the Good Woman’ … I do hope someone bought M. Hadol a giant plush teddy bear that year.

Here’s another detail:

Only because I thought it would be more fun to leave you all with Billets doux and Grand Esprit …