I’ve been working for a long time on the history of map histories. In the process, I’ve encountered many scholars who have contributed in various ways. To keep them all straight, I’ve made notes about basic biographical details: full names, dates, what kind of scholar they were, etc. It has been confusing to add this information to the works in progress, and the various biographies and obituaries make their bibliographies too long. So, I’ve decided to put them all online here: https://www.mappingasprocess.net/dramatis-personae It’s an ongoing project, so let me know please if you see errors or ..read more

I’ve been struggling for months now on how to deal with Arno Peters and his world map. Every time I turn to the subject, I just get bogged down by the complexity of the scattered and multifaceted literature, by the insanity of much of Peters’ map work, and by the different responses to his work. There is the matter of the significance of the “Peters phenomenon,” as John Loxton (1985) called it, for subsequent map scholarship, especially as his projection has fallen largely from use and his specific arguments have proven tendentious, to say the least. Add to this the fact that the debates were ..read more

2023 Books in Map History, plus Some from 2021 and 2022 Previously Missed It’s time for the annual list; I doubt if I’ll see any more before the end of the year, so here it is. Previous annual lists are from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017. As ever, inclusion in this list does not mean that I’ve actually seen the book. I do have many of the following, and the Osher Map Library has many more, but some I still know only from library catalogs or from amazon.com. Similarly, inclusion is not a sign of approbation; I’m just presenting the titles that I have encountered. Note: for the most par ..read more

Last night (30 November 2023) we opened my new exhibition at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine. It’s been over a year in preparation, mostly thinking and developing categories of work to be exhibited, then planning the walls and label placement, all ending in a wild week of installation and label writing! The image in the blog roll is of Levi Yaggy’s 1887 schematic world map, probably my favorite graphic in an entire show of remarkable works (although its content is reprehensible by present-day standards). Kevin Callahan of Kimball ..read more

Here’s a great map that has had a bit of attention recently, and is a really fun work to explore. I’ve been trying to make it fit the work-in-progress, but in one place it just gets in the way and in another it repeats insights from other maps and just unnecessarily bulks up the manuscript. I’m therefore laying out the core story here, combining elements from a number of sources, to get it out of my head. Bernard Sleigh, “An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland” (1917). Click on image to see high-res version at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern M ..read more

As of 5 July 2023 (slightly delayed by the holiday weekend), Cartography in the European Enlightenment, Volume Four of The History of Cartography, joined its published brethren on the freely accessible, un-paywalled website of the University of Chicago Press! Part 1: Part 2 (with continuing numbering from the first part): Both parts of this volume, originally published in 2019 (although covid and other factors delayed publication to April 2020), are available as a series of PDFs on the Press’s website: https://press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V4/Volume4.html All that scholarly and mappy good ..read more

New essay just published in Imago Mundi 75, no. 1 (2023): 1–22: The First Facsimile Collections and the Parisian Origins of the History of Cartography ABSTRACT: Map historians have long thought that their field of study has an exceptional origin, springing into life fully-fledged in Paris in the 1840s when the Frenchman Edme-François Jomard and the Portuguese visconde de Santarém created large collections of facsimiles of medieval and Renaissance maps and then squabbled over credit for creating the ‘history of cartography’. This essay revises the story by adducing three earlier and much sma ..read more

Should you be interested, The Routledge Handbook of Geospatial Technologies and Society just came out in book and as an ebook. Edited by Alex Kent and Doug Specht. Full details and 20% off (through 30 September 2023) at: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Geospatial-Technologies-and-Society/Kent-Specht/p/book/9780367428877. My chapter is a bit of an odd-man-out, by comparison to the rest of the volume (which is generally heavy on the technological or on the theoretical) on “Latitude, Longitude, and Geospatial Technologies to 1884” (pp. 7–22), has the following sections: Locat ..read more

I’ve been looking at the catalog to another remarkable and innovative map exhibition that I would have loved to have been able to see in person. The folklorist Peter Benes installed New England Prospect at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, between 21 June and 2 September 1980 (just before I began my undergraduate career at University College London and two years before I ever realized that the field of map history even existed). The show featured no less than 132 [n1] seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps and plans from or about New England. Fortunately, a detailed ca ..read more

At a combined memorial event for Arthur Robinson and David Woodward, Joel Morrison recollected walking down State Street near the UW campus and listening to David’s running commentary about the often improper or inept use of different typefaces on the storefronts. This would have been in the later 1960s, when very few people other than graphic designers knew anything about typefaces and their qualities. But then Apple came out with the first Macintosh desktop computers in 1984 and introduced the world to graphic user interfaces and to the Joy of Fonts. (David was an early adopter and devoté of ..read more