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It’s been great fun blogging on Tumblr, and people have been in touch with some fascinating information (and maps) as a result. I’m not about to stop, but new posts will go live on our new website at www.bryarsandbryars.co.uk - see you there!

Kerry Lee, his dog Jim, and Dick Turpin on Hampstead Heath.

Now and again the internet brings surprises of the best possible kind. In an earlier blog post about pictorial maps of London I lamented that next to nothing had been written about the artist Kerry Lee, best known as a creator of pictorial, often gently comic maps of British towns and cities in the mid 20^th century. His life and career had been summarized in rather unsatisfactory two-line entries like this one: http://www.artbiogs.co.uk/1/artists/lee-kerry-ernest

I guessed that the most likely candidate was Kerry Ernest Lee, born in Hackney in 1903; a trawl of institutional holdings revealed various works which were potentially attributable to the same artist, ranging from text-book illustrations to wartime cut-away drawings of German aircraft, but I had no immediate way of linking them. Then, out of the blue, I had an email from Kerry Lee’s son, John, telling me that Kerry Ernest Lee is indeed our man.

Many of Kerry Lee’s maps depict the artist sitting sketching in the corner, with his dog beside him. John writes: “if I remember right the first one was called ‘Jim’.  He was a particular pal of mine and my confidant as a small boy.  But over the years in the maps the dog by Dad’s side became symbolic rather than particular.”

John has been enormously generous already with his time and with images of material which remains in the family. What follows makes no claim to be definitive, either as a biography or as a catalogue raisonné, but I’m delighted to reveal a few things here, which I hope will lead to further research.

Kerry Lee with his son John

Lee spent some of his early years in Switzerland with his brother Don. He then attended Reading Schools of Arts and Science, the Slade, and the Sorbonne in Paris. For a time he assisted his step-father, Mr Harvey (an architect and builder), as a draughtsman for several large buildings in London, including one of the earliest to boast a roof garden. The 1929 Wall  Street Crash and the Great Depression pulled the rug from under the business. Mr Harvey seems to have lost his fortune and emigrated.

Lee looked for an alternative source of income, and produced his first map of London. He established Blandford Studios off Baker Street with a small group of fellow independent commercial artists, known as ‘Associated Artists’.

Kerry Lee at Blandford Studios

His first pictorial map of London may have been produced for the Coronation of George VI in 1936. His well-known map of London produced for the Southern Railway in 1938 shows the royal coach at the foot of the map, attending the State Opening of Parliament.

Lee was attached to the Air Ministry during World War II. He was based in Hertfordshire making detailed cut-away drawings of German aircraft, apparently recovered from crash sites, to advise RAF pilots of new developments, for example in armour plating or firepower.

Heinkel He 177

After the War Lee returned to Blandford Studios. His celebratory map London: the Bastion of Liberty was published for the Travel Association of Great Britain c. 1946-47. He designed numerous maps as posters for British Rail: Cheltenham Spa (1951), Bedford (1953), Carlisle (1953),  Nottingham (1953), Londonderry (1953), London (c. 1954), Dublin (1954), Edinburgh (1955), Norwich (1955), Cambridge (1957), Lincoln (1962), ‘Come to Wales’ (c. 1965). John notes that his father made two maps of Cambridge: a large one for British Rail, and a smaller one for ‘Pictorial Maps’, to match similar sized maps of Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Design for Cambridge

Stratford-upon-Avon

Other pictorial maps include Birmingham, Jersey, Huddersfield, Chester, Derby, Leeds and Liverpool. Some, such as Oxford, are truly pictorial maps:

Others (eg Norwich and Lincoln) are architectural composites:

John knows of designs for maps of Paris, Rome, and sketches of Venice and New York, but it is not clear if they were ever published. Similarly, a ‘Literary Map of Britain’ seems to have remained unpublished:

He produced at least three murals of London, for the City Bank of New York in Berkley Street, for the Yorkshire Building Society in the Strand (still in situ), and this one for the Cunard office in Lower Regent Street:

Mural for Cunard

He illustrated (or, to use his term, ‘decorated’) a number of books early in his career: a text book on arithmetic (Trevelyan & Morley: Four Walls, 1938, in the ‘functional arithmetic through citizenship’ series); a book on teaching English (Palmer: Book III More Advanced Oral Exercises and Written Compositions, 1939); a revised edition of Frank Swinnerton’s Georgian Literary Scene, and J. Hampden Jackson’s Problems in Modern Europe - the Facts at a Glance (1941). He also seems to have provided a map for the June 1936 issue of Time and Tide magazine: The Links & the Breaks in the chains encircling Nazi Germany & Sanctioned Italy.

One of Lee’s first maps was of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where the family lived during the war:

The following anecdote, recounted by John, is very telling, given Lee’s evident delight in weaving puns and references to history and folklore into his maps: “Dad was great company for children, full of games and stories. At an early age I was familiar with classical mythology and English history and folk lore because I had it all as bedtime stories. Anyway, one time home on leave during the war, Dad and I went for a walk on Hampstead Heath after a ginger beer in the Old Bull and Bush (Dad always described ginger beer as being “full of beg-pardons”). Now during the war Hampstead Heath was dotted with many bomb craters because sometimes piles of firewood were lighted during German night raids to make it look as though they had hit something interesting and so drop more bombs there instead of vulnerable built-up areas.  Anyway, Dad and I were sitting on the edge of a bomb crater, when Dad reminds me about Dick Turpin. He says Hampstead Heath was one of his haunts, laying in wait for stage coaches labouring up Hampstead hill and then having robbed them, galloping off along the Spaniards Way jumping right over the toll gate to make his escape. But, he said, there might have been times when his pockets were full of coins and as he galloped along some might have fallen out – “so I wouldn’t be surprised if with all the disturbance of the ground here, an observant young man might find something.”     So right on cue I started poking about and digging at the edge of the bomb crater – and would you believe it, in no time at all I found a cache of old coins!      It was quite a while before I learned that Dad had previously visited an antique shop to buy some old coins as ammunition for his story.”

Napoleon’s Abdications

This month is going to be all about Waterloo. I’m certainly expecting to see a healthy tranche of related material at this weekend’s London Map Fair. But I’m rather pleased with this separately published map we’ll have on our stand at the RGS, a broadsheet which would have been passed from hand to hand among Frenchmen dissecting the final collapse of the First Empire. 

Tardieu, Jean-Baptiste Pierre: Plan général du siège de la ville de Paris: Par les troupes alliées dans la journée du 30 Mars 1814, et relation de divers combats qui eurent lieu dans les environs de Paris en Juin 1815, après la défaite de Buonaparte à Mont-St.-Jean […] par J.-B. Tardieu, attaché ci-devant au Dépôt général de la guerre, d'après les matériaux communiqués par plusieurs officiers supérieurs de l'Etat major russe, et les reconnaissances particulières, faites sur les lieux. A Paris : Chez J.B. Tardieu, graveur-éditeur, Rue de Sorbonne, No. 2, prés celle des Mathurins; J. Goujon, Md. de Cartes Géographiques, Rue du Bac No. 6, prés le Pont-Royal; Chez Martinet, Rue du Coq St. Honoré; Gautier, Quai des Augustins, No. 37, [ca. 1815]

Copper engraving, 26 x 39 cms, original hand-colour, blank verso. Some light soiling, folded for the pocket (vertically and horizontally).

A broadsheet plan of the siege of Paris by Allied troops in 1814. France was drained by losses in Spain and Russia, and vastly outnumbered by the Allies; Paris surrendered and Napoleon was forced to abdicate. Our map also shows the series of battles that took place near Paris in June 1815, in the aftermath of the French defeat at ‘Mont-St.- Jean’ (the name Napoleon gave to Waterloo). Napoleon abdicated again a week after the battle, but French efforts to defend their capital against the Allies of the Seventh Coalition were only abandoned after a final Prussian victory at Issy, just to the south west of Paris, on July 2-3. 

Napoleon surrendered on July 15, the last event (incorrectly given as July 14) mentioned in the text engraved on either side of the map – slightly more cramped than the rest, as if the latest information has been squeezed into the available space. 

The engraver, Tardieu, specifies that he was working with materials provided by several senior officers of the Russian General Staff.

Provenance on maps: a secret map of Iwo Jima, November 1944.

I’ve been writing about book provenance recently, but annotations on maps can be equally fascinating. Seventy years ago this map was used by a US artillery spotter during the battle of Iwo Jima.

The US Marine Corps bore the brunt of severe American casualties during heavy fighting in February and March 1945; only a handful of some 22000 Japanese defenders surrendered - the overwhelming majority were killed. The tiny island was of limited strategic value, though as the first Japanese soil to be captured the potential psychological impact was immense. The determination of the Japanese to fight (almost literally) to the last man brought the likely cost of ‘island hopping’ all the way to the Japanese home islands into sharp focus,  and the use of atomic weapons would soon be justified as a way to save lives - on both sides.

Back to our map, a special air and gunnery target map, corrected to November 1944 and marked secret (a classification lowered to restricted within the combat area itself). It has been printed on wet strength paper (highly durable and water resistant) to a scale of 1:20,000. 

Military installations are marked in in great detail, including probable tank barriers and minefields protecting the viable landing beaches. Of tremendous interest is the pencilled grid - our map has been used by an artillery spotter, calling in fire on Japanese positions.

This is one of those times where it’s great that the map has been written on. It was carried and used on the spot - far more interesting (in my view) than a map which was never issued, and for that reason has survived in perfect condition. Judging by the area covered, our map was used after the initial amphibious landings had taken place.

On the southern tip of the island is Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island, where the US flag was raised on the morning of February 23.

Unauthorized Mapping on the District Railway.

I’m facing one of those conundrums which occur in the daily life of an antiquarian mapseller. A map I’ve never seen before, not described in any of the relevant bibliographical material, no author, no imprint, no date. Ho hum. Here it is:

It shows the District railway, and in style (eg depiction of the stations) it is very similar to the official District Railway maps. Here’s an example from the 1890s:

The official map is much larger (106 x 67 cms vs. 61 x 40 cms) and the lines are superimposed on a detailed street map, rather than a skeleton map of major thoroughfares punctuated with pictorial representations of London landmarks, but the influence is unambiguous. Dating our mystery map is not too hard. There are a number of supporting factors, but the most straightforward method is to go by stations and station names.

Monument Station was was opened as Eastcheap in October 1884 and renamed the following month; neither form appears on the map, giving us a handy terminus ante quem. Tower Station was opened in 1882 but replaced by Mark Lane Station in October 1884, which gives us a viable terminus post quem and a date range of 1882-84. It’s always possible that our map-maker hadn’t seen the latest District Railway map, but broadly speaking I think we can say so far, so good. Now to the vexing question of who made the map and where.

It looks like a tourist map, especially with its pictorial elements. The stations are numbered 1-30 and A-F, presumably for an accompanying guide. It was my friend Winfrid, though, who spotted the curious spellings. I’d been seeing what I expected to see.

The most conspicuous one is OXFORT Street instead of Oxford Street. Also, COWER Street instead of Gower Street, FARRINGTON instead of Farringdon, and ST JAMES PARK for St James’s Park. There’s also some very unorthodox hyphenation in the various station names, all pointing to a foreign publisher.

As always, if you happen to be reading this and have the map, complete with guide, in front of you, do drop me a line and let me know more.

Campaign kit for the Peninsula: Stockdale’s map of 1812.

Provenance is a much abused term, or at least it’s much misunderstood. After poring over a Speed county map in the shop people will often turn to me and ask about its provenance. Only in exceptional circumstances can one track every movement of a book or a single sheet of paper over a period spanning hundreds of years - in the case of maps extracted from atlases it’s well nigh impossible - but what people often mean by ‘provenance’ is whether or not something is legit: how do you know it’s real, and how do you know it hasn’t been pinched from somewhere? The answer, in both cases, boils down to experience.

What I can’t say, and it probably wouldn’t interest anyone greatly if I could, is that our hypothetical county map had been hanging on the wall of one Peter Huggins Esq. of The Drive, Camberley, since he bought it from Weinreb and Douwma in 1972. That is, unless the renowned Huggins collection had been publically dispersed and he had left marks of ownership. And that’s really what provenance is about: bookplates, ownership signatures, inscriptions and annotations which give us tantalising glimpses of how printed materials were read and used, and by whom. This map is a wonderful example of that:

This is John Stockdale's A New Military Map of Spain and Portugal, compiled from the nautical surveys of Don Vincente Tofiño, the new provincial maps of Don Thomas Lopez, the large map of the Pyrennees by Roussell and various original documents, published in London in September 1812. It is a huge folding map on 4 sheets, in total approx 218 x 166 cms, engraved by a member of the Neele clan (probably Samuel John), dissected into 72 panels and laid on linen as issued, with original hand-colour in outline, and its publisher’s slipcase with printed title label. 

Publication was advertised in the press (London Star, Morning Chronicle, The Eclectic Review); in a case or on rollers the price was £5, 5s. - a substantial sum in 1812 (see www.measuringworth.com, a favourite site of mine; we’re talking hundreds of pounds at least). Napoleon withdrew 20,000 troops from Spain after the loss of his Grande Armée in Russia, but the remainder were by no means beaten and fighting raged across the Peninsula over the next two years. A large-scale map like this would have been indispensable to officers in Wellington’s army, but in the ordinary way of things we’d have no means of knowing if our map made the journey from London to Spain. Fortunately, we have provenance. Exham Vincent wrote his name on the title label.

According to the Army List an Exham Vincent served with the 39th Foot, commissioned as a Lieutenant in July 1803, and promoted to Captain on April 1 1813. The 39th’s battle honours include Albuera (1811) and Vitoria, the Pyrenees, Nivelle, Nive and Orthez (all 1813-14), raising the possibility that the map was carried and used on campaign. Exham seems to have been a family name, so there’s an outside chance that this was Captain Vincent’s dad, anxiously tracking his son’s movements as reports of Wellington’s battles appeared in the press, but it would seem curious to deprive a serving officer of such a valuable piece of kit. There is a later ownership inscription of W.J.E. Fosbery: according to Burke’s Dictionary of the Landed Gentry, there is a connection by marriage between our Vincents and the Fosberys of County Limerick. Everything falls into place.

Pictorial plans of London: MacDonald Gill and beyond.

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

Update: in early 2014 Winfrid de Munck and I wrote more about the different states of Gill’s map here:

http://timbryars.tumblr.com/post/72558836150/cornering-the-states-of-macdonald-gills

I’d like to devote the rest of this post to other maps which were show clear signs of being influenced 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 Gill it most certainly isn’t. Mind you, it was popular enough for Geographia to issue it in jigsaw form:

My friend Winfrid de Munck has an example with a different border and initials in the lower right hand-corner; an ownership inscription is dated July 1934:

I read that as W.J.H. - hopefully it will be possible to identify the artist in due course.  

Below 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. It may simply have been a desire to maintain a sense of normality. 

It isn’t easy to find signs of bomb damage on the Bond Panorama either, published by the Baynard Press in 1944.

Bank of England employee and artist Arthur Bond was an ARP observer on the roof of the Bank during the second Blitz; V-weapons were unleashed against the capital for the first time in June 1944. According to the Bank of England’s own website, the Bond Panorama was printed in 200 copies which were given to members of staff who had also served as firewatchers. Bond’s 360 degree panorama of the London skyline, as seen from his observation post, borders a reworking of the Ordnance Survey map, with a one mile radius around the Bank. Significant buildings can be located from the key using degrees. The Baynard Press was a commercial printer noted for the quality of its colour lithography, with clients including London Transport.

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. Update: In 2014 I wrote more about Bullock’s work here:

http://timbryars.tumblr.com/post/89739376810/leslie-george-bullock-cartoon-maps-for-children

 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 diagrammatic 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 confirm 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 well known poster London: the Bastion of Liberty 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; the earliest versions of the map reference the Big Four). 

This is a more typical version, revised for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

First published c. 1946-47, a postwar celebration of historical and contemporary London, Lee’s poster has strong ties to his map of London Town published by the Baynard Press for Southern Railways in 1938 and revived by British Rail in the 1950s, when Lee was at his most active and successful. Much of his surviving work seems to focus on town plans and views for the various BR regions.

If you happen to know anything about Kerry Lee, do please get in touch. Only the scantiest information is available at present: “poster artist, active 1950s” and a birth year of 1904 (via the V&A) is about all on offer. Looking at the 1911 census, the likeliest candidate is Kerry Ernest Lee, actually born in 1903 in the parish of St John at Hackney, Essex. The artist has included a self portrait in his London Town, dressed in a blue smock and broad-brimmed sun hat, his dog seated behind him while he signs his name. 

There seems to have been a postwar flurry of this kind of pictorial map-making. Here’s a 1949 map of Tower Hill and District made for Toc H by calligrapher Maisie Rose Sherley (1920-2008):

Sherley taught at Medway College of Art 1946-80; her other work includes a pictorial map of Ambleside, the layout and execution of the pilots’ names in Daisy Alcock’s RAF Battle of Britain Book in Westminster Abbey and a panel in the Nurses’ Chapel, also in the Abbey. She had studied her craft under Daisy Alcock and Dorothy Mahoney, both of whom had studied under or worked with Edward Johnston. Another postwar pictorial map, probably early 1950s, is this one by Francis Chichester (aviator, yachtsman and map-maker); like the Geographia map above, it could be purchased 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. 

As Chichester’s Map & Guide of London, with a slightly greater extent (including Regent’s Park and Kensington Gardens to the north and west) and supported by additional maps including a distinctive version of Beck’s Underground diagram, it was issued as a pocket atlas - often with promotional covers which suggests that it was often given as a gift by private companies.

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!

William Morris announces his ‘pocket cathedral’: a specimen leaf from the Kelmscott Chaucer.

The Kelmscott Chaucer lends itself to superlatives. The first page is perhaps the most celebrated example of typography in English. It’s certainly the most famous in the context of of private press books, inspired by the skills and craftsmanship of the early printers. However, we’re not looking at a page in a book, not even one limited to 436 copies. This is something far rarer, which was issued separately three years before the publication of the complete work, and which differs from the final version. This is a specimen leaf, one of a handful of copies circulated in 1893 to drum up interest (and subscriptions) for what would prove to be William Morris’ last great project. 

The full story appears in the annotated list of all the books published by the Kelmscott Press accompanying a collection of William Morris’ essays, which appeared posthumously (1902) as The Art and Craft of Printing. It seems that “Mr. Morris began designing his first folio border on Feb. 1, 1893, but was dissatisfied with the design and did not finish it. Three days later he began the vine border for the first page, and finished it in about a week, together with the initial word ‘Whan,’ the two lines of heading, and the frame for the first picture, and Mr. Hooper engraved the whole of these on one block. The first picture was engraved at about the same time. A specimen of the first page (differing slightlyfrom the same page as it appears in the book) was shown at the Arts and CraftsExhibition in October and November, 1893, and was issued to a few leading booksellers…”

The main picture was one of eighty-seven designed by Morris’ great friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones; it was Burne-Jones who wrote “If we live to finish it, it will be like a pocket cathedral".

Specimen leaves were produced for other Kelmscott Press books, sometimes in large numbers. 2000 copies of a quarto prospectus for The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (the first appearance of the black letter ‘Troy’ type used in the Chaucer) with specimen pages, were printed at the Kelmscott Press in December 1892. This appears to have been an entirely different proposition, circulated among “a few leading booksellers” and exhibited at the fourth Arts and Crafts Exhibition (Morris had succeeded Walter Crane as President of the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society). It may originally have been a bifolium, so the first pair of leaves (ie four pages) of text, but if so an early owner seems to have decided to divide it and frame the first leaf; perhaps the second was framed alongside it, but it is now lost. The only other example which I have seen does not have 'specimen’ printed in red in the lower margin, but the setting of the text was identical.

The setting of the text allows us a glimpse of Morris’ thought processes at work. He decided that the large initial was too close to the printed border above it, and dropped it down a line to leave white space. In the final printed version there are six, not seven lines of text beneath it, and the setting of the rest of the text reflects the change.  

Back to our annotated list: “On May 8 [1896], a year and nine months after the printing of the first sheet, the book was completed. On June 2 the first two copies were delivered to Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Mr. Morris”. Burne-Jones was right to be concerned for his friend’s health (he worked feverishly to complete the illustrations, devoting every Sunday to them). Morris died on October 4, the opening day of the fifth Arts and Crafts Exhibition. 

This is one of those artefacts which communicates the thrill of creation, something of the excitement and anticipation which Morris and Burne-Jones must have felt as these first trial sheets were pulled from the press. 

UPDATE: March 2015. No copy in the British Library, but there is an example in the National Art Library at the V&A, incorrectly catalogued as being printed in the year of publication of the complete work (1896) but described as a proof and clearly the same animal, with seven lines of text beneath the initial word. Like our example it is a single leaf, though it differs in not having the word ‘specimen’ printed in red: 

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1009260/print/

Sydney and the origins of ‘Becksploitation’

Astute commentators have already noted that the 1939 Sydney Underground map is “strikingly similar” to Beck’s diagrammatic Tube map (see, for example, Claire Dobbin in London Underground Maps). It has even been suggested that this is the first straight copy of Beck’s work. Here it is:

You’ll see why I’ve had a bit of fun with it in the past, putting it in a London shop window and letting passers by scratch their heads and try and work out how it fits with the current Tube network. And of course, even though some of the names (such as Richmond and Camden) are the same, it doesn’t. Even the cover, with its bar and roundel logo, setting of the text and coverage of the central area, is a pretty much a direct copy of the Beck passenger maps issued by London Transport 1933-38.

The curious thing is that Sydney decided to celebrate Beck a matter of months after London Transport dropped his services in favour of work by Hans Schleger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a hugely influential pioneer of corporate design, who worked under the pen name ‘Zero’. (The best survey of his work was written by his wife, Pat Schleger: Zero: Hans Schleger, A Life of Design. Lund Humphries 2001.) Schleger updated the diagram between 1938 and 1941, when Beck was permitted to resume his work (that is, until LT stopped answering his letters, circa 1960).

The covers show how much changed between the Beck and Schleger issues of 1938, and here’s the Sydney map in context. It’s the one lying on top, by the way.

As you can see, it has a great deal in common with the 1938 Beck at the foot of the photo, while Schleger’s airbrushed Art Deco design at the top is a very different beast. 

It’s proving surprisingly difficult to find detailed information about the Sydney map. Answers on a postcard, please! Here’s what I currently have:

Sydney Suburban and City Underground Railway Map, No. 1 1939. Sydney, Waite & Bull for the Commissioner for Railways, New South Wales.

16.5 x 24.5 cms. A printer’s job number, bottom left, but the initials E.P.C., bottom right, adjacent to the name of the printer, may be the draughtsman.

This, I think, is the job number:

And this may well be our semi-anonymous draughtsman, next to the logo of commercial printer Waite and Bull:

So, things which puzzle me. The Sydney Underground goes back to the 1920s. I’ve seen later diagrammatic maps, but nothing before or after which is quite so clearly inspired by Beck. Why was there no No. 2 1939? Or even, No.1 1940? Perhaps the design proved unpopular with Sydney commuters, or maybe LT had a sense of humour failure and threatened to sue, even though they had just dropped Beck’s design (if not the concept) themselves… And who is EPC? Did he make any other maps?

The real interest here, of course, is how other cities have tackled the problem faced by London since 1863 - how best to map the railways beneath one’s feet.