PICTORIAL MAPS

An American Genre

From the 1920s to the 1960s, American popular culture and commercial mapmaking intersected to produce a remarkably creative period in the history of Western cartography. During those years, dozens of graphic artists and cartographers created thousands of pictorial maps depicting the history, geography, and culture of the United States and lands overseas. No other country produced the quantity, quality, and variety of pictorial maps that the United States did. Although now little known, pictorial maps were enormously popular during their heyday, decorating homes, schools, and clubs; appearing in books, magazines, and newspapers; and circulating as tourist guides and advertising brochures. The maps reflected American culture, capturing the dynamism of the nation’s burgeoning skyscraper cities, great industrial factories, and streamlined locomotives, airplanes, and automobiles, as well as portraying the country’s fascination with its colonial and early Republican past. Pictorial maps also displayed advances in printing technology, particularly color lithography, and showcased the talents and originality of some of the nation’s leading graphic artists. By World War II, pictorial maps had created a powerful visual image of the United States and were beginning to reimagine the look of the world for a mass consumer audience.

The pictorial map genre has a long and distinguished pedigree. Medieval maps, Renaissance city views, Dutch world maps, and American bird’s-eye views all incorporated pictorial elements. In the early twentieth century, English graphic artist MacDonald Gill, taking advantage of color lithography, created dazzling pictorial maps for the London Underground Railway. His maps were extremely popular and widely influential.1 But it was in the United States that pictorial mapmaking reached its zenith. In the mid-1920s, American pictorial maps first burst into view as a significant part of the country’s burgeoning popular culture. The economy was booming, New York had supplanted London as the world’s largest and most dynamic city, and Hollywood movies spread images of America around the globe. Pictorial maps reflected this cultural vitality. Drawing on their own mapping heritage as well as new design trends from Europe, American graphic artists and cartographers pushed the boundaries of pictorial mapping in exciting directions. Hundreds of strikingly designed and richly colored pictorial maps poured off the presses during the late 1920s and 1930s. Even the Great Depression did not stem the flow. Although production inevitably slackened during World War II, several innovative pictorial maps were published during the 1940s, and many more were created during the postwar boom years. By the 1960s, however, the genre was waning. Greater use of photography in advertising, a shift away from the map as an advertising tool, and the retirement of pioneering graphic artists who first excelled in the 1920s and 1930s helped bring the golden age of American pictorial mapping to a close. A handful of graphic artists in the United States still practice the craft, but their output is much smaller and their impact far less than in the early twentieth century.2

Pictorial maps formed a distinctive cartographic genre. They were not scientific representations of the Earth’s surface, but artistic renderings of places, regions, and countries. Pictorial maps commonly depicted people, history, architecture, landscape, and terrain. They combined map, image, and text, frequently for the purposes of telling a visual story or to capture a sense of place. As a popular art form, pictorial maps appealed to a wide audience. They were often as attractive to children as to adults. The best pictorial maps were characterized by bold and arresting graphic design, bright and cheerful colors, and lively detail. Many depicted the United States with great verve and excitement. They reflected the country’s cultural confidence and optimism, helping to shape the way people looked at America and the wider world.

The dominance of scientific mapping in Western culture has meant that pictorial maps have been largely ignored. In the United States, these maps have been treated as ephemera, the flotsam and jetsam of an enormous sea of popular culture. As a result, only a few libraries have collected such maps, and even fewer archives have accessioned the professional records of the graphic artists who designed them. Picturing America begins the task of sorting out the historical record of these cultural artifacts. The book examines pictorial maps that were designed, printed, and published as an individual sheet or poster or as part of a foldout brochure. At least two thousand such stand-alone maps are known to have survived.3 The book does not survey the thousands of pictorial maps that appeared in various publications or were printed on other media, such as handkerchiefs, scarves, and tablecloths.

Drawing on the extensive collections in the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, Picturing America charts the development of the genre during its golden age from the 1920s to the 1960s. The book considers the significance of American pictorial maps in the history of Western cartography, outlines the development of the genre, identifies several representative artists, studies the process of creating a pictorial map, examines pictorial map design, discusses the marketing of maps, and highlights two collectors who donated their extensive collections to the Library of Congress. Six sections of plates illustrate different categories of American pictorial maps.

Significance of Pictorial Maps

“The curse of many a childhood is the study of geography—and the curse of geography, for many people, is the dullness of maps.” So wrote American journalist Jay Mordall in 1929. 4 He continued, “One remembers even now with vague discomfort the drab colors and dreary shapes of Africa, South America, Asia—which was just an overgrown offshoot of Europe—with the names of the country’s products printed in the proper places in tiny, illegible type.” For Mordall, mapmaking had lost a “little of its interest” because it was “no longer an art.” Over the centuries, cartography had become an exact science, and “imagination and poetry” had “gone out of it.”

When Mordall was writing in the late 1920s, American mapmaking was dominated by scientific and commercial interests. The federal government, through the US Geological Survey (USGS), produced topographic and geological maps. Private companies, such as Rand McNally, George F. Cram, and C. S. Hammond, issued atlases and individual map sheets. The National Geographic Society created a range of products, from the well-known magazine with its map inserts to map sheets and atlases. Oil corporations, frequently working with General Drafting Company and Rand McNally, turned out road maps, popularly known as “gas maps.” 5 Towns and cities also produced their own transit and street maps. All these various maps showed the location of places for the purposes of navigation, wayfinding, and planning.6 Maps were produced with a constant scale, aligned to the grid of latitude and longitude, and oriented to north at the top of the sheet. Decorative information was eschewed in favor of a striking cover, as on gas maps, or demographic and economic information, as in atlases. Scientifically accurate and functional in use, these maps had a standard, uniform look. “With only a few producers using relatively similar techniques,” historian Susan Schulten observed, “American maps began to develop a rather homogeneous style as the industry focused increasingly on profits rather than aesthetics and tailored its products to suit the widest possible audience.”7

Pictorial maps were quite different from these scientific maps. Unlike the federal agencies and publishing houses that produced relatively uniform maps, artists and cartographers created a great variety of pictorial output. In many cases, these mapmakers produced only one or two maps over the course of their careers, usually as a sideline to their bread-and-butter commercial work. As a result, American pictorial maps reflected an enormous range of individual artistic styles, and no one artist dominated the genre. This stood in marked contrast to other countries. MacDonald Gill was by far the leading pictorial mapper in Great Britain from the 1910s to the 1940s, and Loucien Boucher played a similar role in France in the 1940s and 1950s. Although few artists in the United States reached the level of Gill’s accomplishment, the sheer number and great variety of pictorial maps in the United States had no parallel.

American pictorial maps also differed from scientific maps in their content. As mapmaker Jack Atherton observed in the 1930s, “Today’s decorative maps no longer attempt guidance of an explorer’s destiny, leaving that tremendous responsibility to topographical maps ably compiled by scientific methods. Instead, through a wealth of illustration and a reasonable degree of geographic accuracy, they reveal intimately the innermost character of a country, incorporating subtly the charm and romance of the past with a vivid picture of the present.”8 Pictorial maps captured the “innermost character of a country” by highlighting history, landscape, architecture, and human attributes such as affection, attachment, nostalgia, and memory. Pictorial maps amused and instructed, showed the global reach of war, and reflected the prosperity of postwar America. They also enthusiastically sold places, regions, states, industries, transportation, products, and services of all kinds. The finest pictorial maps spun together maps, pictures, and text to create a visual story or representation that instantly summarized a sense of place, delighting the eye and stimulating the viewer’s imagination. Although ignored in most histories of cartography, pictorial maps were arguably the most creative and dynamic part of American cartography in the middle decades of the twentieth century.9

Cultural Influences

American pictorial mapmakers drew inspiration from a rich cartographic heritage. Medieval maps with their fantastic beasts, alarming sea monsters, fabulous cities, and statuesque kings and queens offered plentiful ideas.10 Although medieval maps were not as widely reproduced in the 1920s and 1930s as they are today, black-and-white illustrations could be found in books and magazines, and a few manuscript maps existed in major public and university libraries. The American Geographical Society, then domiciled in New York City, received its great medieval mappa mundi, or world map, in 1906.11 Elaborately engraved sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps from Italy, the Netherlands, and France were more readily available in major libraries. These maps established standard ways of presenting noncartographic material to the viewer, principally through the use of decorative borders and elaborate cartouches.

American pictorial mapmakers could also draw on their own heritage of pictorial maps, particularly those produced by lithography. After the Civil War, numerous maps depicting humorous, satirical, commercial, and political subjects were published, either as broadsides or in newspapers and journals. Designed to attract the reader’s attention, these maps were usually bold in design and limited to two or three colors. Another type of popular pictorial map appeared on trade cards. The Arbuckle Coffee Company issued sets of trade cards in the mid-1880s that showed different parts of the world.12 A typical card comprised a simple map flanked by two or three pictures of local scenes. From there it was but a short step to move pictures onto maps. Around 1890, Schaefer & Weisenbach of New York printed Rambles Through Our Country: A Geographical Game for the Young, a magnificent chromolithograph that showed American states, their principal towns, and typical landscapes. In 1915, Matthews Northrup Works of Buffalo, New York, a firm known for its high-quality printing, produced a full-color pictorial map of economic activity in the United States.13 In its rich color and thumbnail scenes, the map anticipated many of the pictorial maps that were published more than twenty years later. In 1919, the American meatpacking company Armour created an advertisement showing a food map of the United States.14 Three years later, Armour published the map as an individual sheet. Nevertheless, these various pictorial maps were isolated examples; they did not yet form a wave of pictorial mapping.

Jan Huygen Van Linschoten, Typus orarum maritemarum Guineae, Manicongo & Angolae ultra Promentorium Bonae spei susq., 1598. With their evocative vignettes, elaborate cartouches, compass roses, and fine lettering, early printed maps provided inspiration to twentieth-century pictorial mapmakers.

Image courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Incorporated, RareMaps.com

H. W. Hill & Co., Map of the United States, Showing the Farm Animals in Each State, 1878. Late nineteenth-century advertisements used picture maps to sell products.

Image courtesy of Boston Rare Maps Incorporated

Arbuckle Coffee Company, State of Maine, 1889. To advertise its coffee, Arbuckle produced hundreds of trade cards that combined images and maps.

Private collection

Schaefer & Weisenbach, Rambles through Our Country: A Geographical Game for the Young, circa 1890. Recognizing the appeal of pictorial maps for children, the American Publishing Company designed a pictorial map as a board game.

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Armour Company, Armour’s Food Source Map, 1922. The company used a pictorial map to advertise its national meat-packing business.

Image from American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries

One type of pictorial cartographic image that was produced in large numbers was the bird’s-eye view of cities and towns. Although these views date back to 1500, when Jacobo de’ Barberi’s great View of Venice was published, they reached their greatest development in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.15 Spurred by the invention of cheap lithographic printing, artists began making bird’s-eye views of towns and cities in the 1830s.16 Some views were taken from surrounding hills and mountains, but most combined on-the-ground depiction of buildings and their representation from an imaginary viewpoint high in the air. Three-dimensional representation of buildings was combined with two-dimensional map layout. Some of the most artistically accomplished views shaded into pictorial maps. A view of Fresno County, California, circa 1920, was even called a “pictorial map.” Nearly 5,000 bird’s-eye views were eventually created, covering as many as 2,400 individual places, with some of the largest cities having more than thirty different views. Although the interest in such images began to wane by the 1890s, thousands of framed views decorated the walls of American homes, schools, libraries, and offices into the twentieth century. For graphic artists, it was not a great leap of imagination to move from a bird’s-eye view to a pictorial map.

Charles R. Parsons, City of San Francisco. Bird’s Eye View from the Bay Looking South-West, circa 1878. Late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century bird’s-eye views provided inspiration to pictorial mapmakers.

Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress

Pictorial Map of Fresno County and Mid-California’s Garden of the Sun, circa 1920. This late example of a bird’s-eye view was titled a “pictorial map,” an explicit recognition of the close affinity between the two forms.

Image courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection

Another important influence was American popular visual culture. Many pictorial mapmakers worked as commercial artists and were familiar with advertising, comics, cartoons, movies, and posters. Brash, colorful advertisements could be found on everything from fruit crates to billboards. Newspapers dedicated pages to comics printed in full color. The first successful animated cartoon with synchronized sound made its appearance in 1928 with Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, starring Mickey Mouse. Brightly colored and boldly designed posters advertised the products and services of many American companies, particularly those of the travel industry. All these visual forms filtered into pictorial maps: graphic artists were quick to incorporate speech bubbles, story panels, comic strips, cinematic panoramas, and striking design into pictorial maps. In employing these visual tropes, pictorial maps soon became another part of America’s enveloping visual culture.

A more diffuse cultural influence on pictorial maps was the Colonial Revival movement. The centennial of American independence in 1876 created enormous interest in the colonial and early federal periods, an interest that lasted through the sesquicentennial in 1926 and even into the early 1940s. Indeed, some scholars argue that the Colonial Revival is still with us in the twenty-first century, making it the “most popular, long-lasting, and widespread expression of identity that has yet developed in the United States.”17 Apart from national commemorations, the Colonial Revival movement provided a refuge for many Americans disturbed by the country’s rapid industrialization, influx of immigrants, rampant commercialism, and enveloping mass culture. The Colonial Revival movement touched many aspects of art and design, particularly architecture, gardening, and household furnishings. Its most spectacular creation was the preservation of colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, which began in 1926.18 Although the movement focused on historic buildings and landscapes of the thirteen colonies, the Colonial Revival also affected French Louisiana and Spanish Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. To commemorate the past and enliven colonial settings, Colonial Revival devotees staged historical pageants, hired costumed reenactors, and produced a variety of printed material, ranging from guidebooks to colonial facsimiles and historical maps. For pictorial mapmakers in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial and federal periods offered a rich vein to tap, providing a variety of patriotic content as well as opportunities to recreate historical styles of cartography (plate 23).

European trends in the visual arts also shaped American pictorial mapping. As the world’s leading metropolis in the early twentieth century, London had enormous cultural sway. Among many strands of influence emanating from the imperial capital was the publicity material produced for the London Underground Railway. A complex and heterogeneous network of lines in the early twentieth century, the Underground was welded into a distinct corporate identity by general manager Frank Pick.19 He introduced numerous marketing innovations, including commissioning some of the country’s leading artists to design subway posters.20 These posters, designed in a variety of eye-catching styles, quickly gained an international reputation. Alfred Yockney, a well-known English art critic and editor of the Art Journal, declared that “every new design . . . has been an event in the world of art.”21 Graphic artists in the United States soon became aware of what was called the “poster revival.”22 Through articles in the art press, notably International Studio, the American version of the highly influential British publication The Studio, new designs disseminated across the Atlantic.

On the first page of Yockney’s article “Some Recent London Posters,” published in International Studio in 1914/15, was one of Frank Pick’s most extraordinary commissions: By Paying Us Your Pennies, popularly known as the Wonderground Map of London, designed by English artist MacDonald “Max” Gill. A storybook pictorial map of central London showing the location of Underground stations, the Wonderground Map was published in 1914, becoming an immediate success and ultimately the most influential pictorial map ever published.23 It was so popular that a smaller, folded version, with its own colorful envelope, was produced. By the 1930s, the map was being retailed in the United States.24 Gill, the younger brother of sculptor and type designer Eric Gill, earned a living as an architect, ecclesiastical decorator, and letterer.25 Like his brother, who designed the widely used Gill Sans sans-serif typeface, Max was a close friend of typographer Edward Johnston, from whom he learned lettering and calligraphy. Max was also interested in geography, especially cartography, and began making maps as a school boy. An early commission came in 1909 from leading English architect Edwin Lutyens for a series of wind-dial maps, including one for Lindisfarne Castle.

MacDonald Gill, Wonderground Map, 1914. Commissioned by London Underground, Gill’s colorful Wonderground Map was the most influential of all twentieth-century pictorial maps.

Ethel M. Fair Collection (623), Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress

Gill’s Wonderground Map introduced themes that would be copied and developed in American pictorial maps more than a decade later. First, the map used bright primary colors, including yellow for roads. Second, it showed famous landmarks, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, in some detail, while representing Underground stations more symbolically (a mix of temple and tea caddy). Third, the Wonderground Map, like medieval maps, was populated with people, animals (a lion, giraffe, and elephant at the London Zoo), and fantastic beasts (a multicolored, tongue-flicking serpent or “worm” for the Serpentine Lake). Finally, the map included a variety of texts, ranging from nursery rhymes to speech balloons rising from well-known London characters. Humor peppered much of the text and allowed Gill to talk to the reader (“Observe, my dear child, how dexterously has the artist delineated his subject”). With this mix of elements, Gill created a new type of map that had enormous popular appeal.

A further influence coming from London was the revival of lettering and typography inspired by Edward Johnston.26 A disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement, especially William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, Johnston devoted his life to regularizing and developing the art of calligraphy and lettering. In 1906, he published Writing & Illuminating & Lettering, a pioneering handbook that served as the standard reference book for pictorial mapmakers.27 His reputation established, he was soon commissioned by Frank Pick to design a suitable typeface for lettering on Underground stations. The resulting Johnston Sans, the first block letter type of the modern era, was used for all lettering on maps, posters, and notices. Johnston also devised the Underground’s famous red roundel. In 1959, Evelyn Waugh perceptively noted, “Every schoolboy who learns the ‘italic script,’ every townsman who reads the announcements of the Underground Railway, everyone who studies the maps attached to modern travel books is seeing in the light of Johnston.”28

The British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and 1925 served as another influence from London. Although some visiting Americans may have been put off by the celebration of empire, they could scarcely have avoided seeing pictorial maps in Underground stations. MacDonald Gill continued to produce revised editions of the Wonderground Map, as well as new designs, such as Theatre-land (1915), You’ve Only Got To Choose Your Bus (1920), In the Heat of Summer (1922), and Peter Pan Map of Kensington Gardens (1923).29 For the exhibition itself, Frank Pick commissioned cartographer Thomas Derrick and artist Edward Bawden to create The British Empire Exhibition (1924), a dazzling pictorial map displaying fizzing fireworks, crowds of people, exhibition buildings, buses, and trains. A much more restrained version, British Empire Exhibition 1924 . . . Its Situation Described in Relation to the Railways of London, advertised transport connections to the exhibition at Wembley Park. Created as a foldout brochure by Kennedy North in 1923, the map displayed a large blue and white striped tent (“this fine dustsheet”) being pulled back to reveal the exhibition. As on Gill maps, North colored roads yellow and included decorative cartouches, such as the elaborate royal coat of arms above the title. Unlike Gill, however, North had to work with two different scales by enclosing the central map of the exhibition with a differently scaled map of London transport. The result was a strikingly attractive pictorial map that served as the principal guide to the exhibition.

Although London exerted considerable influence on American pictorial maps, a much broader artistic influence came from across the English Channel. French art, architecture, and design had long dominated European culture, and by the late nineteenth century had brought the United States into its thrall. For aspiring American artists and architects, Paris was the center of the art world. French Impressionist painting especially drew American artists to Monet’s Giverny, while Beaux-Arts style had a tremendous influence on American architecture, including the design of such prominent buildings as New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Grand Central Station. Just as the Beaux-Arts tradition was flagging in the 1920s, the French introduced a new stylistic revolution that was to have a major impact on American architecture and decorative art.

Kennedy North, British Empire Exhibition 1924. Produced as an exhibition map and guide, North’s elaborate pictorial map showed buses, automobiles, trams, trains, and subway cars all traveling to the exhibition grounds.

Private collection

In 1925, Paris hosted the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, an international design fair that gave the world art deco.30 Characterized by abstract geometric forms, flat design, and bold colors, the new style affected the design of objects ranging from jewelry to skyscrapers. Although the United States was not represented at the exposition because it had “almost nothing to exhibit conceived in the modern spirit,” the US government sent the Hoover Commission to assess the exhibits.31 The delegates were so impressed that they recommended bringing “back from the Exposition and to exhibit in the principal museums of this country a representative collection of the finest examples of European decorative and industrial art.”32 More than four hundred objects were shipped across the Atlantic for major exhibits beginning in Boston in January 1926, then moving to New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Saint Louis, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. At the same time, the Paris exposition garnered extensive coverage in the American art press.33 Aspiring American artists thus had many opportunities to see and read about the new style. Looking back on the transformation wrought by art deco, the New Yorker opined: “Nineteen-twenty-six was a propitious year for a decorative artist and industrial designer aware of ideas current in Europe and full of enthusiasm to return to America. . . . Commerce was going in for art; and a boom time was coming.”34

Coulton Waugh, The Map of Silk, reproduced in Women’s Wear, February 5, 1921. This charming black-and-white map, showing the history of silk production, gives an indication of the more elaborate color map that Waugh produced for the International Silk Show in New York City in 1921.

F. Coulton Waugh Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

A Humanized Cartography

The first ripples of what became a great wave of pictorial map production in the mid-1920s began with maps produced by graphic artists such as Charles Hamilton Owens, working for the Los Angeles Times, and Coulton Waugh, designing for trade publications and the New York World. Owens worked almost entirely in black and white for newspapers, but Waugh produced both single sheet and newspaper spreads in full color. As a struggling young artist in New York City in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Waugh found a niche in designing textiles and advertisements for the textile industry.35 He used pictorial maps for several publicity pieces. For the International Silk Show in New York in February 1921, Waugh designed The Map of Silk in a “spirit of romance and gaiety.”36 A splendid creation in color and gold leaf, the map does not appear to have survived, except as a simplified black-and-white illustration in a trade publication. Waugh followed with Ye Ancient Map of Cotton for the Textile Product Show in Greenville, South Carolina, in October 1922.37 Finding that his illustrative graphic style worked well for newspapers, he gave up designing textiles and shifted to newspaper work. In 1922, he began producing color spreads for the Sunday section of The World Magazine. These spreads included at least two pictorial maps, forerunners of several pictorial maps that he produced in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1920s (plate 81). Although Waugh later made a name for himself as a cartoonist and painter, he was proud of his pioneering contribution to the pictorial map genre. Moreover, the sale of thousands of decorative maps stocked in his Ship Model Shop of Cape Cod in Provincetown was “a happy way of making a living.”38Coulton Waugh, Ye Discovery of New York Bay and the Hudson River by Ye Great Navigator Hendrik Hudson, a.d. 1609, reproduced in The World Magazine, September 3, 1922. One of Waugh’s earliest pictorial maps, this work anticipates the style and content of his views of Cape Cod and Cape Ann (see plate 81) done in the late 1920s.

F. Coulton Waugh Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

Other graphic artists in New York City were also designing pictorial maps. One of the poles around which much of this artistic energy circulated was Washington Square Book Shop, at 27 West 8th Street, a popular haunt of writers and artists in the early twentieth century. “The Washington Square Shop, presided over by Egmont Arens and Josephine Bell, was during the Twenties the Greenwich Villager’s favorite shop for browsing and even for purchasing books when the price could be afforded,” recalled literary critic Gorham Munson. “In what a high-pitched anticipatory mood we ducked into this book shop once or twice a week to see what was new on its magazine rack. Here were the publications of the new movements in American art and thought and literature. Here were the reviews that were stimulating the young.”39 After her first marriage ended, Bell married Chase Horton in 1923, and her new husband became co-proprietor of the shop.40 The Hortons were among the first and most significant publishers of American pictorial maps. In 1925, they published Joseph B. Platt’s A Map of New York (plate 49), a riotous swirl of orange and blue, speech bubbles, and skyscrapers. Platt was just beginning his career as an industrial and interior designer.41 In the early 1920s, he had lived in the medieval town of Senlis, just north of Paris, working as an editor, correspondent, and illustrator for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and House & Garden.42 By 1925, he was back in the United States, living in New York City and Little Compton, Rhode Island. His map of New York appears to have been his only venture into popular cartography, but it was sufficiently successful that Washington Square Book Shop published several more pictorial maps, including those by commercial artists Everett Henry (plate 32) and Ilonka Karasz (plate 73).

Houghton Mifflin, in Boston, was an even more important force in launching the pictorial map genre. A long-established publishing house with a reputation for integrity and quality, Houghton Mifflin specialized in trade and educational books.43 From its offices on Park Street overlooking Boston Common, the firm had published some of America’s most celebrated authors, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry James, and Henry Adams, but it was also a leader in the burgeoning educational market, publishing textbooks and reference works. Realizing the potential of pictorial maps for this market, the company published some of the country’s earliest examples, issuing eight between 1926 and 1934.44

Houghton Mifflin launched their foray into pictorial mapping with maps of Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, created and drawn by Edwin B. Olsen and Blake E. Clark. Olsen, a native New Yorker, graduated from Harvard with a degree in architecture in 1923 and then went on to further training at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York. After a short spell teaching architecture at the University of Idaho, he moved back to 603 Boylston Street, Boston, and advertised his services as “Architect” and “Maps.”45 Clark, a native Bostonian, attended Bowdoin and Tufts, and then moved to Paris to study at the leading art academies. By 1925, he was back in Boston, pursuing a career in landscape and marine painting.46 Although Clark soon disappeared from the art scene, Olsen went on to a career with the leading architectural firms of John Russell Pope, Eggers & Higgins, and McKim, Mead & White, working on such commissions as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History), and Jacqueline Kennedy’s restoration of the White House.

Detail from Joseph B. Platt, A Map of New York, 1925, showing “This is the shop where this map was born.”

Image courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library

During his time in Idaho, Olsen toured the principal cities of the West and began to formulate his ideas about a “humanized cartography.” “On that trip,” he explained to a reporter, “the idea that had been buzzing in my head came to a resolution. If you visit a city and want really to taste its flavor, to feel its history and at the same time see it in its modern aspects, you have to take a few auto trips. . . . Then you read eight or ten books and roam a little on your own. I wondered why a map—one map and not two or three supplemented by guidebooks and pamphlets—could not give what I was after, you know, the spirit, the color of a city. A map could be picturesque and yet informative, could avoid the stereotyped network of dull, straight lines, and still keep the city within bounds. Well, I thought it could be done, at least that the combination of Blake and myself . . . could do it.”47

Olsen and Clark began work on their first map, The Colour of An Old City: A Map of Boston Decorative and Historical, in September 1925, spending six months of “exhaustive study and incessant sketching,” with much of the research taking place in the Boston Athenaeum and the Boston Public Library.48 “Oh, the books we read,” they commented later, “histories, diaries, town meeting minutes, old documents, old prints, old maps—until we felt swamped and drowned. . . . The sleep we got during the six months of work on the map wouldn’t make one good nap if it was lumped together. . . . We’d research and then draw. And draw and color and work up ideas and then research.”49 At the beginning of the project, Olsen was employed in an architect’s office and Clark in a factory, but they soon resigned their jobs to devote all their time to the map. “It’s work,” the two men said, “checking up every detail of line and date and location and then selecting and reproducing what we decide to use. But it is pleasant work.” It was also remunerative. For their Boston map, Houghton Mifflin provided an advance of $500 on royalties, a considerable sum at the time. Olsen and Blake collaborated equally on their first two maps and divided their royalties evenly, but on their last map, which portrayed Washington, DC, Olsen received 65 percent, reflecting his greater contribution.50

Published in April 1926, Olsen and Clark’s Colour of an Old City was among the first stand-alone, full-color pictorial maps produced in the United States (plate 47). Strikingly colored and packed with information and incident, the map was an immediate success.51 Houghton Mifflin’s press release praised the map as a “model of excellence in this quaint and contemporaneously popular decorative art.”52 Measuring 71.5 × 95 centimeters and issued folded in its specially designed envelope, the map used a format that became common for the genre. A central decorative panel was surrounded by a border containing smaller maps and vignettes. The central panel presented an oblique view of Boston, showing buildings in three dimensions, as on a bird’s-eye view, as well as a dense concentration of people, animals, ships, and airplanes. Speech balloons and text scrolls provided further information. At the base of the map, an illustrated book entitled “What It’s All About!” lay open. Here, Olsen and Clark offered an explanatory ditty: “Rather like a crazy quilt / of interesting facts and fancies built / Tis no engineering feat / of surveyed miles and buildings neat / But in some corner if you search / you’ll find out where to go to church . . . All this before your eyes / notwithstanding the small size / we offer in this ditty / T[he] Colour of an Old City.” The surrounding border contained six reproductions of old maps and thirty-eight drawings of historic scenes and buildings that are no longer standing.

Olsen and Clark declared that they knew “of no other maps that have been done for other cities that [were] like their map.”53 They may have been unaware of Platt’s Map of New York published the previous year, but they must certainly have known MacDonald Gill’s Wonderground Map.54 The busy Boston map was strongly reminiscent of the London map. Olsen and Clark’s caricature depiction of houses was almost identical to Gill’s drawings in London. They also followed Gill in using yellow for roads, which made for a stunning contrast to the inky blue waters of Boston Harbor and the Charles River. Gill had used red to help pick out Underground stations; Olsen and Clark also used red for prominent buildings and pictorial highlights. Gill’s border design, a black-and-white chevron pattern interspersed with differently colored circles, must have inspired the two Americans to use black-and-white diamonds and red circles for their map borders. Moreover, Olsen and Clark relied on the same mix of humor and history that characterized the Wonderground Map. The two artists used speech balloons and nursery rhymes in much the same way as Gill. Although strongly influenced by the Wonderground Map, Olsen and Clark were correct in claiming that The Colour of An Old City was a new type of map for the United States.

Coming from Houghton Mifflin, Colour of An Old City attracted attention. A perceptive review entitled “Learn of Boston With a Chuckle,” in the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, recognized that “the vogue of intimate cartography, of maps that amuse and instruct as well as direct, while not altogether new, has developments from time to time such as are evidenced in ‘The Color [sic] of an Old City.’ . . . To demonstrate that this is not a new art, one has but to recall the maps of the Middle Ages which are still preserved in museum[s] and reproduction. The fantastic descriptions of winds and sea monsters and imagined cities therein contained evidence of the same whimsicalities that are popular today.” The review lauded graphic touches such as “a crier bellowing through a scarlet megaphone ‘I am two miles from City Hall,’ and what peruser of maps will not welcome this departure from the trite and formal concentric circles superimposed on so many city maps.”55

Even before the Boston map was published, Olsen and Clark began work on a map of Philadelphia to mark the nation’s sesquicentennial. Published in June 1926, A Kite View of Philadelphia and the Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition was not as successful as the Boston map.56 Pressed for time and less familiar with Philadelphia, the two artists spent only three months researching and drawing the map.57 In contrast to the rich tapestry effect achieved in Colour of An Old City, Olsen and Clark were content to draw the grid of Philadelphia and mark only the most prominent buildings on the map’s central panel. Instead of an open book at the base of the map, Olsen and Clark included a large-scale map of the exposition. The surrounding border contained reproductions of old maps of the city, two Philadelphia seals, and various drawings of historical scenes and buildings. Soon after publication, Roger Scaife, a director at Houghton Mifflin, wrote to Olsen and Clark, explaining that the firm had received “a number of comments, and I think justly so, that the map of Philadelphia is neither as artistic nor as attractive nor as complete as the Boston map.” 58 With the pair already working on a map of Washington, DC (plate 48), Scaife advised that “for our mutual advantage Washington should excel Philadelphia in all these aspects if we are to continue the series.” He also noted, “I think that Washington lends itself much better than Philadelphia to a decorative map, and if you gentlemen will give it the same close interest which you gave to Boston and familiarize yourselves with the history, undoubtedly you can repeat the first success.”

As the map of Washington would be the most prestigious in the series, Scaife was obviously concerned about its development, and at some point in the summer of 1926, the two artists met with him and Ferris Greenslet, also of Houghton Mifflin, to work out the map’s basic design.59 They decided that the White House would occupy the center of the sheet, as “this is the appropriate position for it.” They also set the map’s boundaries. As Olsen recounted, “the northern boundary shall be determined by and include Sheridan Circle because, as Mr. Greenslet mentioned, of its social interest; going East we take in everything up to the Library of Congress, beyond which there is little of interest; on the South, though we can only actually include up to L Street, I think by using a little license, as we have on the other maps, we will be able to give sufficient indication of the War College and United States Navy Yard, and by the same means we will be able to get in Arlington Cemetery, Georgetown College, and the United States Naval Observatory on the West.” The two artists then worked up a “rough sketch” and invited comments. Scaife responded immediately, suggesting that they include decoration to mark the city’s circles, “which will make focal points of attraction”; include features on cross streets; indicate historic sites, such as Ford’s Theatre; show roads leading to famous localities beyond the map, such as Fort Myers, Mount Vernon, and Richmond; and include border pictures depicting the early White House and the church at Alexandria where Washington worshipped. As the map neared completion, Scaife saw a final draft. “As I said over the telephone,” he remarked, “it is excellent, except for the lettering in the pictures around the edge of the map. This lettering would be all right if it were on the regular script style of the two open books [in the border on either side of the map], or if it were in a printed letter of the style of the street names. In its present form, it has not the finished look that appears in the rest of the map.”60 Scaife kept a watchful eye right to the end.

After working intensively on the Boston and Philadelphia maps for nearly a year, Olsen and Clark were fully conscious of the demands of pictorial mapping when it came time to design the Washington map. In “Description of the Washington Map,” prepared as a Houghton Mifflin press release, Olsen touched on some of the defining characteristics of pictorial mapping, particularly concerning theme, scale, and representation,61 and he was explicit about the map’s theme. “As Washington’s chief characteristic in outward aspect is an architectural one, so we felt it our duty to express that in the map. . . . For we think—is it not the purpose of these decorative maps to interpret what we called in the map of Boston ‘the color’ of the city? This in Boston was of a picturesque tone and the city was handled so. On the Philadelphia map emphasis was laid on the curious old anecdotes, historic and humorous, to be found in the history of that city.” For Washington, the theme was the imposing architecture, and that brought up the issue of scale. In drawing the monuments, Olsen had to use “cartographer’s license.” He recognized that a constant graphic scale “would have made the buildings individually so diminutive as to be practically invisible,” and thus adopted what he called a “scale of interest.”

In creating a new humanistic scale, Olsen recognized one of the major differences between scientific and artistic mapping. He observed, for example, that the White House, “probably the most interesting building in the city and one of the smallest, if drawn to the graphic scale of the map[,] would appear as a large pin prick puncturing the executive grounds.” However, given its “proper size in the ‘scale of interest’ [it] transcends in size on the map all other buildings but one—the Capitol.” Finally, Olsen was concerned with representation. He and Clark decided on “a naive fashion of setting down only the main facade of each edifice, usually the front.” Olsen explained that “this method simplifies greatly and the result in the mind of the author is of more artistic merit than if each building had been shown in its correct perspective. In a way, it hearkens back to the maps of the cartographers of ancient times.” In shifting from the three-dimensional bird’s-eye view of the Boston map to an architectural two-dimensional depiction, Olsen and Clark began to explore the possibilities of representation on pictorial maps. When Houghton Mifflin published the map in early December 1926, the company’s directors thought it “most attractive.”62 Olsen and Clark considered the Washington map “most splendid” and the “best of the three.”63 A copy was sent immediately to the White House. “It is a most interesting design,” responded Calvin Coolidge, “and a most attractive decoration.”64

Houghton Mifflin was so pleased with the first three pictorial maps that it continued to commission artists to make maps into the early 1930s. Even as it was working with Olsen and Clark, the publishing house was negotiating with Mélanie Leonard of Sandwich, Massachusetts, to reproduce in color her black-and-white pictorial map of Cape Cod, first published by the Berkeley Press in March 1926.65 The color version came out in March 1927, well in time for the summer tourist season on the Cape (plate 83), and the map sold well.66 Sadly, her next venture, a stunningly original map of New York City, was rejected. Although recognizing the design as “ingenious and whimsical,” Houghton Mifflin worried that it would “not make a quick appeal to the market.”67 Leonard responded graciously, explaining, “I’ve been doing things of this sort all my life, without much success as to general appreciation. ‘Specialized appreciation’ I’ve had lots of.”68 The map was later published as A Map of New York in the Air with Additions Omissions and Premonitions Or Super-Man-Hattan, one of the most ethereal views of New York City ever created (plate 50).

Houghton Mifflin published four more pictorial maps, including Charles Turzak and Henry T. Chapman’s striking art deco Illustrated Map of Chicago (plate 55) and Ernest Dudley Chase’s charming Mercator Map of the World (plate 16), both in 1931, but the maps published in 1926 made the greatest impact. Within months of the Boston map’s publication, graphic artists turned their hands to creating pictorial maps. Alva Scott Mitchell and Elizabeth Paige May, members of the 1924 class of Wellesley College, created a map of Wellesley (plate 75), an amusing depiction of undergraduate life on campus.69 It was among the first of a new subgenre of collegiate pictorial maps. Mitchell went on to produce several “Scott-Maps,” including pictorial maps of Boston, Concord, Salem, and the White Mountains. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Shurtleff, a Boston-trained artist living in Concord, New Hampshire, and Helen F. McMillin, another Wellesley alum and former editor of the Granite Monthly, partnered to create a pictorial map entitled Map of the State of New Hampshire.70 In New York City, Charles Vernon Farrow had designed A Map of the Wondrous Isle of Manhattan (plate 51), published in May 1926. A month later, the National Association of Real Estate Boards published an enormous pictorial map of the United States created by young Ignatz Sahula-Dycke, a commercial artist from Czechoslovakia (plate 131).71

The handful of pictorial maps published in 1925 and 1926 defined the principal characteristics of American pictorial maps in the prewar years. Bold blocks of vibrant color gave the maps energy and excitement, while decorative borders, compass roses, winds, scales, titles, and legends added graphic richness. Speech bubbles, cartoon figures, and historical scenes provided further interest. Capturing the dynamism and optimism of 1920s America, the maps proved enormously popular, appealing to adults and children alike and quickly becoming a significant part of American visual culture.

Notable Pictorial Mapmakers

From the 1920s to the 1960s, staff cartographers at the nation’s largest map publishing houses, such as Rand McNally, General Drafting Company, and National Geographic, created many pictorial maps, but graphic artists and cartographers working on their own or for commission also produced significant numbers. While some of these artists, such as Rockwell Kent and Everett Henry, enjoyed considerable success, many labored in relative obscurity, their work hardly known today. A number of women designed pictorial maps, probably the first time that they had played such a significant creative role in Western cartography.72 Several of these artists were committed to public education and designed pictorial maps as a means of teaching children.

Unlike staff cartographers working at the large American map publishers, graphic artists were not bound to the strict conventions of scientific mapping. Many of them did a variety of work, from commercial advertising to book illustration. As a result, they were open to the new ideas and styles swirling through graphic design in the 1920s and 1930s, and could experiment with design, content, and scale in their maps. The following biographies of five of the more prominent designers give some sense of the enormous range, stylistic variety, and talents of American pictorial mapmakers in the mid-twentieth century.73

charles h. owens (1881–1958)

Even before Washington Square Book Shop and Houghton Mifflin published their maps, Charles H. Owens in Los Angeles was designing some of the most original pictorial maps ever created.74 Although he never produced full-color pictorial maps equivalent to those by Olsen and Clark or many others, Owens did perfect the bird’s-eye view for newspapers. In the process, he created many individual black-and-white and color aerial perspective maps that easily stand comparison with full-color pictorial maps.

Born in San Francisco in 1881 and raised in Santa Cruz, Owens had a natural facility for sketching. He turned his back on formal schooling at an early age, graduating from third grade “with more or less honor,” and thereafter he devoted his life to sketching.75 His first break came in San Francisco, where he was taken on as errand boy at the San Francisco Call.76 His artistic talent soon recognized, Owens worked in the art department until moving to New York in 1898, where he had stints at several New York papers over the next decade. Returning to Los Angeles in 1908, he was taken on at the Los Angeles Examiner and then joined the Los Angeles Times in 1921. By then, he had already published several pieces in the Times, including “Map of Poland on the Peace Table Closing Germany’s Gateway to Russia” in 1919, a graphic illustrating a range of cartographic tropes including a globe, wall maps, and inset maps. A modest, self-effacing man, Owens saw himself as “just a newspaper craftsman.” He stayed with the Times until retirement in 1953. He died in Los Angeles five years later.

Perhaps because he had no formal training in art or cartography, Owens combined his natural talent for quick sketching with strikingly original aerial perspectives of landscapes. He was known as “an indefatigable sketcher,” always working with notebook in hand drawing people, buildings, and landscapes. In the years before photographs were published, newspapers relied on staff artists to create black-and-white sketches to illustrate stories, often under tight deadlines for the next day’s paper. Owens’s ability to sketch quickly, combined with his interest in depicting the landscape as if it were a map or part of the globe, made him especially suited for newspaper work. As a child, Owens had probably seen bird’s-eye views of San Francisco and Los Angeles.77 As a newspaperman, he must have been aware of aerial perspective maps created during the First World War to illustrate battlefronts. Such “picture maps” included those by English artist G. F. Morrell for The Graphic, a popular and influential British magazine, which were collected and published in the United States in Book of the War (1918).78 Otto Kurth created similar maps for the Mid-Week Pictorial section of the New York Times.79 Whatever his inspirational source, Owens seamlessly incorporated oblique perspectives into his work.

Owens was also affected by the desert landscape of Southern California. After the “canyons of New York,” he was “like a kid let out of school” when he arrived back in Los Angeles in 1908. “Everything he saw intrigued him,” wrote fellow Times staffer Joe Seewerker in 1938. “He raved about the beauties of the ‘desert,’ the mountains which formed a backdrop for the sprawling, picturesque Southland.”80 Along with several other artists in Southern California, Owens helped shape the tourist image of the Southwest.81 With the rapid increase in automobile ownership during the 1920s, he frequently published illustrated articles in the Times on auto tourism in the greater Los Angeles area, the Southwest, and northern Mexico, and he even decorated a car, an “Essex flyer,” with western scenes such as the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, and Yosemite.82 Many of his sketches of Los Angeles illustrated “Nuestro Pueblo,” a series of newspaper columns about the city’s history that he coauthored with Seewerker during the 1930s and that were later collected and published as a book.83 Owens also published in Touring Topics, the monthly magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California, one of the major booster organizations in the state.84 Owens was even known to sketch while driving at high speed, once explaining that “the secret of drawing in an automobile is to preserve complete nonrigidity.”85Opposite, Charles H. Owens, Map of Poland on the Peace Table Closing Germany’s Gateway to Russia, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1919. Owens’s oblique view of the conference table shows a globe and maps at different scales. He used oblique perspective and collage in many of his graphic designs.

Detail from Charles H. Owens, Mexico’s West Coast, circa 1936. Owens slipped in a vignette of himself sketching and fellow Los Angeles Times staffer Harry Carr typing.

Private collection

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times (1881–1989)

Otto Kurth, Zone Maps, 1916. Kurth employed an expansive oblique perspective to show European battle fronts during World War I. Charles H. Owens and Richard Edes Harrison used similar perspectives to show the global conflict of World War II.

Private collection

This fascination with speed and “rapid-fire” sketching soon led Owens to make sketches from the air and to create three extraordinary pictorial maps.86 His first large-scale effort showed the enormous Colorado River basin, published as a two-page spread in the Sunday rotogravure section of the Los Angeles Times on March 28, 1920.87 At the time, plans were being drawn up to harness the massive hydroelectric potential of the Colorado and to divert its waters to irrigate a good part of the desert Southwest as well as provide drinking water to Los Angeles. Sketching from a plane flying from Calexico, California, east over Yuma and the Gila River at an altitude of two thousand to eight thousand feet, Owens enjoyed a panoramic view of much of the Imperial Valley of California and southwestern Arizona. The finished map showed the vast extent of the Colorado drainage basin, surrounding mountainous relief, and the curvature of the earth. Owens also included three sketches and three inset maps, a collage format that he would use repeatedly.

In the following years, Owens’s interest in flight intensified. In September 1924, he produced a pictorial map of the northern hemisphere showing the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe by American army pilots. Published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, the map was widely reproduced; indeed, the Times claimed later that it appeared “in more newspapers of more different countries than any other newspaper drawing ever printed.”88 The next year, Owens drew a large pictorial map of the Panama Canal (plate 97). Printed as a double-page spread in the Sunday rotogravure section of the Los Angeles Times and also as an individual sheet measuring 68 × 106.7 centimeters, this map was one of Owens’s cartographic masterpieces. “It is literally a ‘picture map,’” announced the Times, “and shows the canal in relief as it would look to one flying across the Canal Zone in an airplane.”89 Owens spent a month in Panama gathering information and working on the map. The War Department lent him an army plane and pilot, allowing the artist to make “sketches . . . in the cockpit . . . at an elevation which lifted the skyline to the level of the Pacific on one hand and the Atlantic on the other, with the entire length of the Canal unrolled between.”90 In addition, Owens pored over photographic material in the archives of the Canal Administration building in Balboa and made numerous sketches on the ground. The resulting map showed “the viewpoint of one who could envisage the entire zone as it actually lies on the curving surface of the globe.”91 Dominated by a shaded relief image of the canal cutting through mountains set diagonally across the sheet, the map included numerous inset maps at various scales, as well as pictorial vignettes of the canal and historical landmarks. Detailed drawings of the hydraulic systems of locks and reservoirs showed how the canal worked. Sketches of statues of Columbus and Balboa situated the American-engineered canal into the longer European history of the isthmus. A swirling collage of maps and images, Owens’s Panama Canal map marked a major advance in the scale and ambition of bird’s-eye view pictorial mapping.

In 1926, Owens published the third of his great panoramas, A Pictorial Map of the Los Angeles Metropolitan District (plate 57).92 Subtitled A Complete Geographical Guide to the Fastest Growing Territory in the Entire World, the map was drawn in the midst of Los Angeles’s extraordinary economic and urban expansion. Produced for the Los Angeles Times, the major institution boosting the city, the map can be seen as a significant document in the developing iconography of Los Angeles.93 Standard nighttime photographs taken from Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena or Griffiths Observatory in Los Angeles emphasized the city’s formless sprawl.94 By centering his map on downtown and drawing a twenty-mile radius around the central business district, Owens depicted a more structured city. Moreover, he departed from the night view looking south from the mountains by showing a “sweeping aerial view” looking north from the Pacific Ocean toward the mountains and cloud-filled horizon. This was the cartographer’s orientation. Within the twenty-mile radius, Owens depicted urban centers, roads, railroads, water courses, airports, oil fields, coastlines, and natural landmarks.95

Owens devoted six months to drawing the map, including repeated flights to sketch from the air and driving five thousand miles to crisscross the region.96 The finished map was a paean of praise to Los Angeles. Owens emphasized the city’s industries, particularly the oil industry with its hundreds of derricks dotted across the landscape, the built-up core of downtown, and the immense expanses of land across the Los Angeles Basin waiting to be developed. Ever keen to boost the city, the Times encouraged readers to buy an extra copy and “Send It to Eastern Friends. . . . Eastern skeptics, inclined to doubt the resources of the Southland,” the Times intoned, “will find Mr. Owens’s map . . . a more convincing document than volumes of printed matter.”97 For the Times, a pictorial map was clearly worth more than a thousand words.

During the depressed years of the 1930s, Owens continued illustrating news stories, creating panoramic bird’s-eye views such as California Official Tourist Picture Map and Mexico’s West Coast, and contributing drawings to books such as The West Is Still Wild and Nuestro Pueblo.98 “His pencil work on The Times became world-famous,” his obituarist would later note. “It helped build the Harbor and helped build the Owens River Aqueduct and other projects by enabling persons to see compelling visualizations of the undertakings through his perspective drawings.”99 Yet with the outbreak of World War II, Owens found fresh inspiration for yet another mode of pictorial mapping.

Drawing on years of experience sketching from the air and mapping geopolitical relationships, Owens was well prepared to illustrate the global scale of the war.100 Before the United States entered the war, Owens focused on the European theater, producing dozens of maps showing the continent-wide conflict.101 After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he turned his attention to the war in the Pacific. As if employing a viewpoint from near space, Owens looked down on the world, drawing salient sea and land areas, employing arrows to show movement and direction, and sketching battlefield vignettes (plate 139). So popular were his maps that the Times began a series of full-page, full-color war maps in September 1942 that came out every Monday.102 Variously known as “A MAP THAT TALKS!” “ACTION MAPS,” and “global perspective” maps, Owens’s work proved not only popular but also extremely influential, as discussed later, helping shape a new American perspective on the globe.103

jo mora (1876–1947)

Another California artist, Jo Mora, working out of Carmel, created several distinctive pictorial maps from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.104 Characterized by exquisite drawing, rich color, and great charm, Mora’s maps revealed a deep knowledge of Western American history and culture. His maps formed the most important collection of pictorial cartography done by any artist of one particular region of the United States.

Born in Uruguay in 1876, Jo moved with his parents and brother to the United States in 1877, settling first in New Jersey and then in Boston. Educated at some of the best schools in the country, he showed an early aptitude for art. By his early twenties, he was working as an artist for Boston newspapers, illustrating such stories as the sinking of the coastal steamer Portland in 1898, one of the greatest maritime disasters in New England history. Soon after, he illustrated several classic children’s stories, including The Animals of Aesop (1900), Reynard the Fox (1901), and Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1902) for Dana Estes & Co. in Boston. By the age of twenty-five, Mora’s artistic career was well under way.

Although ensconced on the East Coast, Mora had a youthful passion for the romance of the West. He made a foray to Texas and Mexico in the mid-1890s, working on cattle ranches and riding on drives before moving permanently out west in 1903. He worked on a cattle ranch near Santa Inés, California, and got to know the Spanish missions as far south as Ensenada, in northern Mexico. Through his travels, Mora immersed himself in the history of the old Spanish vaqueros and the Catholic Church. The following year, he moved to Arizona to study and live with the Hopi and Navajo. He stayed three years, creating a considerable body of sketches, paintings, and photographs.105 Moving back to California in 1907 to marry, Mora settled in Mountain View, Santa Clara County. He helped his father, a noted sculptor, create figures for the facade of the Native Sons of the Golden West Building in San Francisco, and then, when his father died, took over the commission. By the 1910s, Mora was fully occupied as a sculptor. His last move was to Pebble Beach in 1920, where he spent the rest of his life portraying the Old West of the Indian, the Spanish, and the American cowboy.

Jo Mora, Jo Mora Drawing His New Historical Map of California, 1927.

Used with permission of jomoratrust.com.

Among his many works were a series of pictorial maps that he called “cartes.” In these maps, Mora strove to present geography, history, landscape, and the contemporary world in a humorous, cartoonish style. Some of his first commissions included maps for his friend Samuel Finley Brown Morse, owner of the Hotel Del Monte and twenty thousand acres of Monterey peninsula. The hotel was one of the grandest in the country, catering to Hollywood stars, businessmen, and politicians, but it suffered a devastating fire in 1924. To help publicize its reopening in April 1926, Morse commissioned Mora to create maps entitled California’s Playground (1926) (plate 95) and The Seventeen Mile Drive (1927), the famous scenic loop road around the peninsula.106 Both maps showed the hotel set amid the magnificent coastal scenery. At the same time, San Francisco publisher and bookseller A. M. Roberston, who had done much to advertise the state, commissioned Mora to produce a map of California (1927).107 In the title cartouche, Mora declared: “This whimsical Carte of Topographic and Historic intention . . . is hereby presented by the Limner for what it may be worth—possibly more in smiles than in cosmographic value.” With their whimsical charm and decorative appeal, Mora’s maps were an immediate success. The Marston department store in San Diego, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 1928, commissioned Mora to create a map of the city. The store publicized the map as “Jo Mora’s Whimsical Map of San Diego: A Humorous Presentation of the Topography, History, Development, and Diversified Activities of a California City.”108

By the early 1930s, Mora was a well-established pictorial mapmaker. In 1931, he did maps of Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon, three of the most popular national parks in the United States. Two years later, the Grace Line shipping company commissioned a large map to advertise its new passenger service from New York to Seattle via the Panama Canal (plate 113). In formal terms, the design was not the most coherent; inset maps of Panama, Cartagena, Guatemala, and El Salvador lay awkwardly on the larger map of North America and the Pacific Ocean. But the surrounding frieze of historical figures, particularly Father Neptune welcoming the Grace Line fleet to the Spanish Main, was masterful. In the title cartouche, Mora asked that the carte’s “perusal may be accomplished rather with the smile of levity rather than the frown of research,” which summed up the humorous spirit of his maps. Mora also produced a cleverly designed and well-illustrated book, A Log of the Spanish Main (1933), published by his son.109 Grace Line was so impressed by the book that it bought the entire print run and sold copies to its cruise passengers. Nearer home, Mora displayed his enormous first-hand knowledge of Western life in two graphic works, The Evolution of the Cowboy (1933) and Indians of North America (1936). Packed with detail, these were less pictorial maps than posters. Indeed, Indians of North America was essentially an illustrated ethnography.

In his last maps, Mora revisited some of his earlier themes and created a graphic masterpiece. In 1942, he paid tribute to his local surroundings by drawing Carmel-by-the-Sea Past and Present. Mora packed the map with incident and local characters, but the grid of Carmel with its red-roofed houses was a distracting element. Three years later, he produced a revised version of his 1927 map, California, for the Del Monte Canning Company. He included small portraits of the California missions, a traditional homage to the state’s Spanish heritage, but other parts of the map looked to the present. In a vignette of “California Transportation Throughout the Ages,” he contrasted stagecoaches, wagon trains, and sailing clippers with streamlined diesels, trucks, ocean liners, and a Lockheed Constellation. Mora’s most magnificent map from this period, and perhaps his greatest cartographic creation, was Map of Los Angeles Historical and Recreational (1942) (plate 59). Framed by a border of flowers and dominated by the figure of Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula, the map combined amusing detail with well-balanced design. It served as a colorful pageant of the city’s history and contemporary life, an extraordinary contrast to Owens’s reportorial view of Los Angeles done sixteen years earlier.

Immensely talented as an illustrator, cartoonist, muralist, sculptor, photographer, and writer, Jo Mora has been rightly described as the “Renaissance Man of the West.”110 Much of his work, particularly the realist sculptures, watercolors, and paintings, appears conventional, particularly when seen in the artistic context of his times. His maps, however, are still arresting. The combination of historical personalities, usually arranged in friezes against black backgrounds, cartoon figures enlivening the topography of the map, and the considerable charm of the cartographic ensemble was unrivaled in American mapmaking. “In the final analysis,” concluded art historian Mary Murray, “Mora’s most important works may be his cartes. In these entertaining maps, Mora combined his encyclopedic knowledge of history, his writing, drawing, and cartooning skills, his fine sense of design, and his sense of playfulness to create an art form uniquely his own. Mora’s cartes are still captivating . . . and they exemplify the popular, entertaining, direct, and informative art at which Mora excelled.”111

ernest dudley chase (1878–1966)

On the East Coast, Ernest Dudley Chase was one of the most popular and prolific pictorial mapmakers during the middle decades of the twentieth century. His maps were among the most ambitious of all American pictorial maps, and while many of them adhered to the Mercator projection, Chase was not afraid to experiment with new projections, which produced some of his most intriguing designs. Although nearly all his maps have a certain formality and repetitive quality, Chase was a skillful designer and meticulous mapmaker whose works retain great appeal.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1878, Chase gained his early artistic training at home from his father, a wallpaper designer, who needed sketches of interiors and asked his son to produce them. He received more formal training at the Lowell Textile School and Vesper George Art School in Boston.112 In 1900, he joined Butterfield Printing Company in Lowell; six years later, he moved to the printing firm of W. T. Sheehan in Boston. Although Chase appears to have chosen a career in printing, he also tried his hand at architectural drawing and interior design, producing a detailed, measured drawing and description of his home in Lowell for Carpentry and Building in 1909.113 Chase decorated the interior of his modest Dutch gambrel-roof cottage in Arts and Crafts style, with pitchers, plates, bric-a-brac, a Dutch watercolor poster, and specially designed furniture. He clearly had artistic ambitions, but he was also a shrewd businessman. In 1908, he established his own greeting card company, Des Arts Publishers, which eventually became Ernest Dudley Chase Publishers. Working from a succession of business addresses in downtown Boston, Chase produced greeting cards for the “better-class trade” by giving his product “the stamp of merit and style and exclusiveness.”114 Ernest Dudley Chase Publishers quickly became one of the country’s leading greeting card companies. In 1921, it merged with another, Rust Craft Publishers of Boston, and Chase became vice president of creative design.115 Overseeing the design of several thousand greeting cards each year, Chase had an ideal viewpoint from which to survey the industry. In 1926, he published The Romance of Greeting Cards, a pioneering work on the subject.116 Chase stayed with Rust Craft until his retirement in 1958.

Riding the wave of public interest, Chase began a side business turning out pictorial maps of Europe and North America.117 By the mid-1940s, he had designed enough maps to fill his own mail-order catalog, The Ernest Dudley Chase Decorative Pictorial Novelty Maps. A promotional flyer claimed that he was “the leading creator and publisher of pictorial or illustrated maps in this country, if not, indeed, the world.”118 Chase crafted his maps with care, each taking from six months to a year to complete. He worked with a magnifying glass, inking in, dot by dot, the tiny scenes that covered many of his maps.119 These stamp-size scenes were based on his own sketches, still and motion picture collection (he reputedly shot an estimated one hundred thousand feet of cine-film), postcards, and other illustrative material. Much of this visual material came from his extensive travels in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, but he was not averse to asking for illustrations. For his map of Spain, published in 1935, he wrote to mayors of Spanish towns requesting postcards.120

Among the first maps that Chase designed for commercial sale was Mercator Map of the World, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1931 (plate 16). This charming map’s cheerful colors and menagerie of penguins, dragons, and sea monsters made it suitable for the walls of a child’s bedroom or school classroom. Unfortunately, Chase did not pursue this attractive style. Many of his maps in the 1930s were “designed and drawn with infinite care, correct in every detail,” but lacked warmth or humor.121 His signature trait, the many small, stippled drawings that he applied to maps of Europe, quickly became repetitive.122 Nevertheless, several maps from the 1940s were more creative. Drawing on greeting card sentiment, he designed A Pictorial Map of Loveland (1943) (plate 15), as well as The United States as Viewed from California (very unofficial) (1940). More seriously, he created Mercator Map of the World United (1944) (plate 145) and The Story Map of Flying (1944) (plate 146), which drew on the “Air Age” maps of Charles H. Owens and Richard Edes Harrison.

Ernest Dudley Chase, The Man Who Turns the Prose of Maps into the Poetry of Art.

Image courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection

A final group of maps, designed in the 1950s, displayed postage stamps. Although stamps frequently show images of countries, conjuring up thoughts of geography and travel, Chase was perhaps the first mapmaker to explore this connection. Several of his pictorial stamp maps, including A Pictorial Stamp Map of Navigation and Exploration (plate 43), had stamp edges around the map, perforations for national boundaries, and stamps marking individual countries. While Chase’s stamp maps appeared to be a new departure, his basic style of placing small images on a map had scarcely changed.

george annand (1890–1980)

If Owens, Mora, and Chase created some of the most distinctive pictorial maps of the early twentieth century, George Annand produced a body of pictorial work that was representative of many graphic designers in the United States who turned their hands to different commissions.123 Working as a freelance commercial artist for much of his long career, Annand created pictorial maps, designed dust jackets, illustrated books and magazines, and turned out advertisements. Through much of this work, Annand showed a genuine interest in cartography. Working in color as well as black and white, he designed some of the most elegant and accessible pictorial maps of the period.

Born in Croswell, the “garden spot of the thumb” of Michigan, Annand came from a well-educated family. His father was a doctor from Scotland who migrated to the upper Midwest via Canada, a common route for migrants in the late nineteenth century. Annand received his early education in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Croswell, then moved with his family to Detroit, where he attended high school and enrolled in art school. Later, he moved to New York and took classes at the Art Students League. In 1920, he married a high school friend who had been widowed during World War I and had two young daughters. With a wife and family to support and another daughter soon to be born, Annand had to make a living and commercial art was his best route.

George Annand at his drafting table in his home at 15 West 51st Street, New York City, circa 1943.

Image courtesy of Alice McMahon

Fortunately, the economy was booming in the 1920s and Manhattan, as the center of American advertising and publishing, offered plenty of opportunities. Annand did commercial work for National Biscuit Company (NABISCO), painting, as he liked to say, “Fig Newtons in their native habitat.” Meanwhile, the publishing industry was shifting away from decorative book bindings to illustrated dust jackets. Over the course of his career, Annand designed many dust jackets, including the first with a pictorial map. In 1925, Doubleday, Page commissioned him to design the jacket of Charles Edward Montague’s best-selling satirical novel Right Off the Map.124 Annand created a map of the fictional republics of Porto and Ria. His other map covers included Joseph Hergesheimer’s Quiet Cities (1928) and Archibald D. Turnbull and Norman K. Van der Veer’s Cochrane the Unconquerable (1929).125 He also designed decorative map endpapers.

“Annand’s dream is to save the children of the coming generation from the geographies that seemed so lifeless to him in his youth,” reported journalist Jay Mordall in 1929. “He believes that educators should demand geographies illustrated with ornamental maps—maps that would stimulate children’s imagination. . . . He is using maps decoratively and they do much to make a winning first impression on a reader, stimulating as they are to the imagination and beautiful as they are to the eye in color and design.”126 No doubt Annand’s dream stemmed from his “passion for travel” and an early interest in antique maps. He also collected decorative maps, as well as illustrated children’s books and reference works on costume, architecture, and transportation.127 “He was kind of a packrat,” remembered his daughter Alice. “He always collected stuff, so if it was of any interest and it cost less than five dollars he would buy it.” Among his reference and inspirational treasures were Johnson’s New Illustrated Family Atlas of the World; French artist Edy-Legrand’s colorful children’s books; and several pictorial maps, including Tony Sarg’s oblique view of the town of Nantucket (1931), Karl Smith’s map of Kentucky (1942), a Lucien Boucher Air France map of the world, German pictorial maps with prominent heraldic shields, and Miguel Covarrubias’s portfolio, Pageant of the Pacific, based on the murals he made for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939.

George Annand’s dust jacket for Charles Edward Montague’s Right Off the Map, 1925.

Private collection

Yet the “luxury business” of drawing decorative maps did not last. The stock market crash in October 1929 ushered in the Great Depression and tough times for Annand and many commercial artists. To make matters worse, Annand refused to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), although he approved of its relief efforts and all his artist friends received support. His daughter Alice put it down to his Scots background. “They were very proud [people]. He had a strong feeling about what was appropriate and what was inappropriate. . . . The idea of taking money, which I think he saw as welfare,” was not appropriate. As a consequence, Annand and his family were left in bad financial shape.

In these difficult circumstances, Annand hustled for work, sending out business mailers inscribed with the motto “Good Work, Done Cheap.” With major publishers still producing decorative pictorial maps, Annand picked up several important commissions. For Doubleday, Doran he created A Map of Sinclair Lewis’ United States, as It Appears in His Novels with Notes by Carl Van Doren (1934). At the time, Sinclair Lewis was immensely popular; in 1930, he became the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Annand created a striking design, reversing the usual figure-ground composition by using black for ocean and pale cream for land (plate 41). For Charles Scribner, he produced another literary map, A Pictorial Record of the Principal Events and Places in the Great Novel of the Oregon Trail: The Land is Bright by Archie Binns (1939). Corporations, too, gave him work. General Foods commissioned Authorized Map of the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition (1934), which consumers purchased with Grape-Nuts box tops, and the Waldorf Astoria Hotel commissioned A Chart of Manhattan (1936), showing the location of the palatial hotel (plate 53). By the mid-1930s, Annand must have been fairly well known as a cartographer because Rand McNally, the great map publishing house in Chicago, commissioned him to create two maps in its popular historical Romance series: Romance Map of the Hudson River Valley (1937) and A Romance Map of the City of Washington (1938). His other pictorial maps included Historical Map of the State of New York (1937) (plate 91), A Treasure Hunter’s Map of the West Indies and Spanish Main (1940), and The Islands of the Bahamas (1951).

All these maps followed cartographic convention. They were planimetric rather than oblique views and had title cartouches, compass roses, and scales. The lettering was clear and well-designed. Annand had a deep interest in calligraphy and belonged to the Italic Handwriting Society in London and the Committee for Italic Handwriting in Rochester, New York.128 Although some of his maps were complex, such as the Chart of Manhattan, Annand knew what to include and what to leave out. The result was clear, elegant cartography. “The thing about my father’s maps that’s most striking to me,” reflected his daughter Alice, “is that they are totally readable. . . . No matter how much detail there is . . . you can see exactly what’s going on.” As a person, Annand was “always very elegant . . . and a little bit formal,” even though many of his clothes came from neighborhood thrift shops, and that sense of style saturated his work. “I think a lot of people liked his work because it had this dignified quality,” Alice said. “He could make anything you were selling look good.”

Annand worked continuously until cataract surgery forced him to stop in 1970 at the age of 80. In the last decades of his career, he produced maps for two prestigious publishing projects: The Rivers of America book series and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative. Annand created maps for twenty-eight of the sixty-five Rivers volumes, more than any other cartographer. He began with the first two volumes, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans and Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga, published in 1937, and ended with The Susquehanna and The French Broad, published in 1955.129 The work for Foote was even more demanding. He did all the maps for the first two volumes, published in 1958 and 1963, begging off the final volume published in 1974 because of his cataracts. “This was one of the most interesting and challenging jobs he ever had,” according to his daughter Alice, “because Shelby Foote walked over the battlefields all his life and he made these little drawings and then he wanted those converted into real book illustrations so my father had to take the little drawings . . . hundreds and hundreds of them,” and turn them into maps.

Over the course of half a century, Annand produced an immense body of graphic work, much of it cartographic. Of the hundreds of maps that he designed, only a handful were large, stand-alone pictorial maps. Nevertheless, these maps were among the most refined and dignified examples of the genre, well designed and boldly colored. They also had some of the most splendid title cartouches and compass roses of any pictorial maps produced in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In many ways, George Annand was a cartographer’s cartographer.130

ilonka karasz (1896–1981)

Ilonka Karasz was one of the few women working in American design in the early twentieth century, and she was among the best known of them that were creating pictorial maps. A prominent denizen of Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century, Karasz turned her hand to a variety of decorative arts, designing rugs, furniture, wallpaper, and ceramics, as well as drawing hundreds of illustrations for books, magazines, and posters. Part of this graphic output included a handful of pictorial maps designed for children. These maps still have considerable charm.

Born in Hungary in 1896, Karasz received her art training at the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts in Budapest.131 She emigrated to the United States in 1913 and soon settled in Greenwich Village, heart of the American avant-garde. After her marriage in 1920, she moved out of the city to Brewster, New York, and there built a house and raised a family, though she continued to keep a place in Manhattan. “In the early twenties a young woman, Ilonka Karasz, was one of the outstanding personalities of the Village,” remembered sculptor William Zorach. “She had great talent and great beauty of a very extraordinary kind. It was the period of the Wiener Werkstätte design in furniture, colorful and original textiles, and astonishing interior decoration from Austria. Ilonka belonged to this movement. She had such talent and ability that I think she could have done almost anything in the way of creative art but this is what she chose to do.”132

Ilonka Karasz, 1921.

Photo by Nickolas Muray, © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives; Ilonka Sigmund

Although her textiles attracted attention in the late 1920s, Karasz became best known for her covers for the New Yorker.133 Between 1925 and 1973, she designed 186 covers, many of them depicting panoramic views of towns and countryside.134 From creating panoramas it was but a short step to making pictorial maps.135 For the New Yorker in 1926 and 1927, she produced pictorial map covers of Florida and the Greater Antilles.136 She also designed almost all the maps, including cover and end papers, for Sarah M. Lockwood’s New York: Not So Little and Not So Old, published by Doubleday, Page in 1926, as well as three two-page map spreads showing different stages of world history for Clement Wood’s The Outline of Man’s Knowledge, published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1930. Amid this flourish of cartographic creativity, she designed two notable individual pictorial maps. In collaboration with Alice York, she produced A Child’s Map of the Ancient World (1926), published by the John Day Company of New York (plate 18). The map depicted the Mediterranean Sea and had borders showing a frieze of classical gods and heroic figures. Karasz’s illustration of Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants must have stuck in many a child’s mind. The following year, she created her masterpiece, Plan de Paris, published by the Washington Square Book Shop (plate 73). Advertised as “The most beautiful and really useful of all the Modern Decorative Maps,” the map created a splendid effect.137 Printed in six colors and gold, Karasz’s map displayed the center of Paris framed by a theater curtain and included information on the city’s leading sights and activities. A memorable touch was a vignette of the Chateau de Versailles enclosed by a bower of flowers held by a putto and Marie-Antoinette as shepherdess. Although Karasz designed only two stand-alone maps, they were among the most attractive of all American pictorial maps and must have delighted children and adults alike.

Ilonka Karasz’s cover for Sarah M. Lockwood’s New York: Not So Little and Not So Old, 1926.

General collections, Library of Congress

For all five artists, the creation of pictorial maps was but one part of their oeuvre. Owens churned out newspaper sketches, Mora painted and sculpted, Chase designed greeting cards, Annand illustrated book jackets, and Karasz crafted everything from magazine covers to textiles. Aware of the latest commercial design and not bound by a map company’s house style, these five artists brought fresh ideas to pictorial mapping, ensuring that their maps stayed stylistically current, part of the much larger visual field of mid-twentieth century America. Their biographies also reveal relatively humble backgrounds and modest artistic careers. Although Owens was employed by a large city newspaper and Chase ran a successful greetings card business, the three other artists worked freelance. Needing to sell their work, they designed maps with broad appeal, creating in the process a popular American cartography.

Creating a Pictorial Map

The story of another, less heralded woman involved in making pictorial maps reveals something of the process that brought such maps to the public. C. Eleanor Hall of Port Henry, New York, produced A Romance Map of the Northern Gateway in 1934, which portrayed the history of the Champlain-Hudson Valley (plate 30). As a librarian and town historian, she kept every scrap of paper related to making the map. This record gives great insight into the creation, production, and distribution of a regional pictorial map.

Born in the rural township of Orwell, Vermont, in 1901, Hall attended high school in Port Henry on the New York side of Lake Champlain.138 A bright student, she went on to Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and then to Simmons College in Boston where she received a degree in Library Science. A career as a librarian was one of the few professional paths open to educated women in the early twentieth century. After spells as a school librarian in Ohio and Pennsylvania, she returned to Port Henry in 1930 to take care of her father following her mother’s death. Over the next few years, she immersed herself in local history, collaborating with Charles B. Warner to write The History of Port Henry, N.Y., published in 1931, and then working by herself to create a pictorial map of the Champlain and upper Hudson valleys.

With the Colonial Revival movement in full swing during the 1920s and 1930s, there was immense interest in local history, particularly of the colonial and early republic periods. As a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), Hall was tied into a network of like-minded people committed to recovering and preserving America’s past. Josephine W. Wickser, widow of a prominent Buffalo businessman and politician, was a leading light of the Colonial Revival movement in upstate New York in the early 1930s.139 Wickser became known for her historical pageants, and in 1926, during the American sesquicentennial, she devised several pageants to mark the histories of Fort Ticonderoga, Fort Stanwix, and Fort Oswego. To further popularize American colonial history, she created A Romance Map of the Niagara Frontier in 1931 (plate 29). Wickser researched the historical content for the map and commissioned Buffalo artist Mildred Green to draw the illustrations and cartography. With its bright colors, border text blocks, and scenes from Indian, French, British, and American frontier history, Wickser had created a “pageant on paper.”140 It was a winning formula.

C. Eleanor Hall, circa 1920s.

Image courtesy of Town of Moriah Historical Society

Over the next seven years, eight more Romance Maps were published, including Eleanor Hall’s A Romance Map of the Northern Gateway (plate 30).141 Like Wickser’s Niagara Frontier, Hall’s map focused on the Indian, French, British, and American periods. The title cartouche displayed portraits of French explorer Samuel de Champlain and military leaders Marquis de Montcalm, General John Burgoyne, General Philip Schuyler, and Commander Thomas Macdonough. Hall was particularly concerned with defining the regional extent of her map. Faced with the narrative problem of telling a story over space, Hall used Burgoyne’s disastrous military campaign as the major historical event that defined the boundaries of her map.142 From the Richelieu River in the north to Albany in the south, Hall told the multiple, sometimes overlapping stories of the Champlain and Upper Hudson valleys during the colonial and early republic periods.

Hall went to great lengths in her research. For the vignette of Deborah Powers, pioneer manufacturer of oil cloth, Hall contacted her grandson Albert Powers of Troy, New York. “In going through ‘Landmarks of Rensselaer County, N.Y.,’” Hall explained to Powers, “I came across the striking item about Deborah Powers experimenting with oil cloth and later manufacturing it, a rather unusual enterprise for a woman in pre-Victorian days and one which I would like to include on the map.”143 At Albert’s suggestion, Hall changed the vignette to show Deborah Powers “working at a loom instead of bending over the mixing kettle as first planned.”144 Other vignettes of Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, Emma Willard, Hannah Lord Montague, Mrs. Philip Schuyler, Lady Harriet Acland, and Jane McCrea show that Hall was as interested in telling the stories of remarkable women as those of famous men.

Like many creators of pictorial maps, Hall researched and compiled the content of her map, then hired an artist to draw the illustrations and cartography. Wickser had worked with Carlo Nisita on two maps and recommended him to Hall. An Italian immigrant, Nisita was educated at the Albright Art School, Buffalo, and the Yale School of Fine Arts.145 In 1934, he was head of the high school art department in East Aurora, New York. He visited Hall for a week that August. “We literally lived [the] map all the time he was here,” she recounted. “Then he took his rough sketch back to his studio where he finished it. Later he came up for another revision.”146 “Very much pleased” with the final design, she paid him a lump sum for his work.147 Holling Press in Buffalo printed the map in five colors on a cream-colored antique stock. Hall liked the “buff background so much. It holds the whole thing which would appear scattered on lighter background.”148

The printing bill for ten thousand copies came to $784.75, an enormous sum for an unemployed school librarian during the Depression.149 Nevertheless, sales more than covered expenses. The map retailed at fifty cents. After paying a one-cent royalty to Wickser for use of the “Romance Map” tag and a fifteen-cent commission to retailers, Hall made thirty-four cents on each map, $3,400 for the entire print run.150 In reality, she did not earn as much as this, as she had to lay out money for distribution, advertising, and postage.151 “While I haven’t gone to Florida on the proceeds of the map,” she wrote in 1936, “I have gotten a whole lot of satisfaction out of it and made a lot of new friends through it.”152 By the following year, she had sold nearly five thousand copies, which more than covered her printing costs.153 By 1950, she had sold almost the entire print run, despite living in a “sparsely settled region.” A year later, she published a revised reprint of three thousand copies.

An editorial in the Champlain Valley Review on December 20, 1934, applauded Hall for creating the Northern Gateway map. While recognizing the “remunerative returns which the sale of her maps will bring her,” the Review noted that “she has achieved a remarkable method of advertising the Champlain Valley. . . . Miss Hall’s Romance Map should go far toward building up the future popularity of this region as a vacation playground.”154 The map circulated far and wide, helping to publicize the valley.

More significantly, the map revealed the part played by educated women in preserving and popularizing American local history. Although later Romance Maps of the Hudson Valley and Washington, DC, had sufficient commercial potential that they were published by Rand McNally, Eleanor Hall was never associated with any of the large map publishing houses. She worked by herself and self-published her map. She never created anything like it again and obviously saw it as one of the high points of her long life.

Design Challenges

Since the early nineteenth century, cartographers and graphic artists have spent a good deal of time and effort devising effective means of representing quantitative data on maps.155 An array of visual symbols, ranging from dot distributions to graduated symbols, choropleth maps, and cartograms, have been used to represent statistical series on thematic maps. However, few of these visual symbols were capable of representing qualitative data. A pictorial mapmaker had to grapple with representing place, people, memory, history, activity, and architecture. This required artistic depictions of cultural landscapes and buildings, portraits and scenes, and texts explaining history and meaning. Inevitably, artists flouted cartographic conventions. Although pictorial maps were usually oriented with north at the top, constant scale was frequently discarded. On his pictorial map of the city of Quebec (1932), Samuel Herbert Maw included the warning, “Dimensions & proportions must not be taken seriously.” Such admissions were anathema to quantitative mappers. Nevertheless, the best pictorial maps could bring a viewer into a place or region in a way that few scientific maps could match.

Unlike most topographic maps or road maps, which respected the restrictions of a two-dimensional surface, pictorial maps aimed to create a three-dimensional picture. Graphic artists achieved this in several ways. Most commonly, the designer worked with a two-dimensional base map and placed three-dimensional pictorial elements on top. This had several advantages. First, the artist avoided drawing topography in three dimensions, a time-consuming and expensive task, and could concentrate instead on rendering elements that were the stock-in-trade of graphic design. Second, the base map could be a solid color, rather than shaded as on topographic relief maps. By choosing a strong color for the base map, a graphic artist could create a bold design, which particularly suited the art deco style of the 1920s and 1930s.

If the designer had time and skill, the underlying base map could be drawn in three dimensions and seamlessly integrated into the overall pictorial image. This was particularly important where mountains were an essential part of the pictorial map. Graphic artists in the western mountain states often faced this challenge. Los Angeles–based Charles H. Owens and Gerald Eddy created numerous maps of the basin and range country (plates 57 and 109), Irvin Shope drew the mountains of Montana, and the Kroll Map Company of Seattle published a relief map of the Pacific Northwest (plate 96). Collectively, these artists produced a distinctive Western “school” of pictorial relief mapping that had few rivals elsewhere in the United States.

The final design challenge was integrating text onto the map. Many pictorial maps included large amounts of text, usually providing information about the history of a place or region. The most common method was to place the map at the center of the overall design and then arrange text around it in the border. The Romance Maps series adopted this approach. Eleanor Hall reflected that “boxes” of text take “care of so much material for which there is no room on the picture part of the map.”156 But she also realized their limitations. “The argument against boxes is that no one reads them. If they are there the one in a hundred who does read them can.” A few designers found more ingenious solutions. On their map of Panama, Clark Teegarden and John F. Herman placed “History Briefs,” as well as “Weather Comparison” and “Legend,” on the white sails of three yachts (plate 98). For his map of Ohio, the ever-inventive Arthur Suchy created a brilliant pictorial design that wove text through a variety of images (plate 26). At the center, he superimposed a map of the state on the state seal, and then surrounded it with seals of Ohio educational institutions and portraits of Ohioans who had become president of the United States. A hierarchy of differently sized texts explained map, seals, and portraits. With its muted colors, varied imagery, and flowing calligraphy, Suchy’s was one of the most subtle and complex of all pictorial map designs.

Marketing Maps

Pictorial maps were published by all manner of people and businesses, ranging from map compilers and graphic artists to bookshops, newspapers, publishing houses, and map publishers. Although newspapers incorporated pictorial maps into their daily broadsheets, other publishers had to advertise and market their maps. Distribution varied greatly. Large map publishing companies, such as National Geographic, Rand McNally, and Hagstrom, put out catalogs advertising their pictorial maps that reached a national market. Even a small map publishing company, such as LeBaron-Bonney of Bradford, Massachusetts, had its own map catalog.157 Rand McNally also had a retail store in Rockefeller Center, New York, while Hagstrom had a store on Broadway near City Hall. But bookshops and self-publishers faced more of a challenge. Washington Square Book Shop in Greenwich Village advertised its maps in the New York Times and distributed them through its bookstore and national map retailers. Associated American Artists, which commissioned and published Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias’s map of America, indulged in a handsome full-color mailing.158 Coulton Waugh sold his maps and prints through a catalog and his Ship Model Shop of Cape Cod in Provincetown. Eleanor Hall devised a simple black-and-white mailer to advertise the maps that she stocked in Port Henry and that Rand McNally also distributed. In such ways, pictorial maps reached local, regional, and national audiences, but some self-publishers found it difficult to market their maps. At his death in 1995, Arthur Suchy still had quantities of pictorial maps, printed in the late 1920s, stacked in his studio in suburban Cleveland.159 His maps rarely appear in libraries and archives beyond Ohio, suggesting that they had only limited circulation.

Marketing pitches varied. A primary motive for selling pictorial maps was their educational value. Hagstrom advertised its “Decorative and Historical Maps” as “filled with interesting and instructive geographical and historical data. . . . The Historical and State Maps are unsurpassed for the school room. Students find geography and history more stimulating when the information can be visualized and located.”160 The Graphic History Association of New York, publisher of “Picture History Maps” designed by Elizabeth Shurtleff, advertised its maps as suitable for travel, education, and decoration. Well aware of automobile tourism, the association played up the difference between gas maps and picture history maps. “When you travel—You’ll get there by following a good road map, but it won’t be much of a trip if you see no more than those hard, black road map lines. Take a Graphic History Map with you. It will make the country come alive with all the glamor of history and legend. See history as you go.”161 There was also the problem of interesting the kids. “When Johnny is bored with history—Give him a Graphic History Map. He wouldn’t think of the Puritans as anemic figures from a textbook if he had with his own eyes seen the Arbella sail into Salem Harbor. Let him see history as a bright-colored picture.” For teachers and anxious parents, the association included a history quiz game with Shurtleff’s maps of New Hampshire and Massachusetts (plate 24) to test little Johnny or Susie’s knowledge. Eleanor Hall reckoned that many of her maps had been sold to “historically minded persons, schools and libraries all over the country.”162 “While the map makes a most attractive wall decoration,” she explained, “it is a splendid way of teaching history.”163 Orders for her Northern Gateway map came from schools as far away as Hawaii and Kentucky.Coulton Waugh’s Ship Model Shop of Cape Cod, Provincetown, Massachusetts, circa 1930. Prints and a pictorial map of Cape Ann (plate 81) are shown for sale.

Hagstrom Company, Hagstrom’s Decorative and Historical Maps, circa 1951. The cover shows Jack Atherton’s Maine and Elizabeth Shurtleff’s Map of Massachusetts (plate 24).

Private collection

F. Coulton Waugh Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

“Pictorial Maps Teach Young America Both Geography and Art,” 1947. Three National Geographic Society pictorial maps are shown pinned to a classroom wall.

B. Anthony Stewart/National Geographic Creative

Teachers tacked pictorial maps onto classroom walls and set map exercises, and school, college, and public libraries were keen purchasers. The library at Simmons College, Hall’s alma mater, reported that her Northern Gateway map, “as an encouragement to the freshmen and faculty . . . has been displayed on the bulletin board.”164 The Skowhegan Free Public Library in Maine ordered a complete set of Romance Maps for an exhibition. “We have needed something out of the ordinary to make our townspeople become ‘library-conscious’ again,” the librarian explained to Hall, “and the exhibit of your maps has been of great assistance.”165 The librarian displayed the maps “in related groups, some under glass on a table and some thumb-tacked to a folding screen.” Through such use, pictorial maps suffered damage and were eventually discarded, which helps explain why they can be difficult to find in library collections today.

Pictorial maps sold well to tourists. Across the country, graphic artists and cartographers developed pictorial maps for state tourist agencies, national parks, and historical sites. The Lindgren Brothers of Spokane, Washington, created a range of “hysterical maps” of western national parks that helped the company survive the Depression.166 Eleanor Hall sold the Northern Gateway maps to tourists in the Champlain and Hudson valleys, distributing them to gift shops in Albany, Glens Falls, and Westport; to tourist sites such as Saratoga Battlefield, Petrified Sea Gardens in Saratoga Springs, and Letchworth State Park in western New York; and to the Lake Placid Club, New York, and the Middlebury Inn, Middlebury, Vermont. She also supplied maps to the town of North Hero, Vermont, for Isle La Motte’s “Old Home Day.” Those copies were eventually returned. “We did not sell any,” explained the town clerk. “People seemed to think the price rather high [and] a good many make use of the free maps given out and I guess money is not so plentiful in these parts and it is so hard to make sales.”167 Not everyone could afford a pictorial map during the Depression.

Hagstrom Company, “Decorative Maps for Home, Office, School, Church, and Library,” from Hagstrom’s Decorative And Historical Maps, circa 1951.

Private collection

Pictorial maps were particularly well suited to advertising exhibitions. As organizers of the British Empire Exhibition recognized in 1924, a pictorial map served as both an advertisement for the exhibition and as a handy guide to the grounds. Other world fairs followed this approach. Don Bloodgood created a humorous, incident-filled, two-sided pictorial map for the California Pacific International Exposition held in San Diego in 1935 (plate 132). Four years later, San Francisco held its Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Graphic artists designed several pictorial maps, among them Ruth Taylor’s cartograph of Treasure Island (included in the official guidebook) and Walt Disney’s Mickey’s and Donald’s Race to Treasure Island (plate 2). Miguel Covarrubias produced a portfolio of pictorial maps of the Pacific based on his murals created for the exposition (plate 102). The same year, Tony Sarg designed the official pictorial map for New York’s World’s Fair. By the late 1930s, an international fair without a pictorial map was unthinkable.

With their “decorative charm and interest,” pictorial maps were advertised as suitable for home decorating.168 In its catalog, LeBaron-Bonney included photographs showing a selection of pictorial maps framed and hung over fireplaces in an old New England house.169 The company offered maps framed with an “antique map finish.” Humorous maps were “ideally suited to the carefree spirit of the playroom.”170 The whimsical nature of pictorial maps made them perfect for hanging in children’s bedrooms. They could also be used to make lamp shades, paper baskets, and coffee table centerpieces. Eleanor Hall contracted with an interior decorator in Buffalo to make shades, waste baskets, envelope holders, and “transparencies” to be hung in windows.171 Large department stores, such as Macy’s in New York City, stocked pictorial maps to cater to these varied uses.172

Collectors and Collecting

Printed on cheap acid paper, tacked to school and library bulletin boards, taped on classroom and bedroom walls, and framed and varnished to look “antique,” pictorial maps were never considered valuable. As products of twentieth-century American popular culture, they were also long considered beneath scholarly attention. As a result, pictorial maps have scarcely been studied and rarely collected. Fortunately, two American librarians, Ethel M. Fair and Muriel H. Parry, thought pictorial maps worth saving. Collecting the maps soon after they were published, Fair and Parry assembled remarkable—and remarkably large—collections kept in superb condition. Given the ephemeral nature of pictorial maps and the degradation of acid paper over time, such collections would be difficult, if not impossible, to put together today.173

Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1884, Ethel Fair received her education at Vassar College, the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, and the New York Public Library School (later part of Columbia University).174 She held positions at a variety of state, public, and educational libraries before serving as director of the Library School of the New Jersey College for Women, the largest public women’s college in the United States. She also served as president of the Association of American Library Schools. For her leadership, Fair received an honorary degree from Rutgers University in 1950. As a librarian, she must have seen pictorial maps on display in libraries and accessioned into library collections. Whatever her initial interest, she was certainly collecting pictorial maps as they were being published during the 1930s. By 1937, she had created such a significant collection that it formed the basis of an article on “picture maps” in the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians.175 The collection eventually grew to more than a thousand maps, covering all genres of twentieth-century American pictorial mapping. The collection was given to the Library of Congress in 1973.176 Ethel Fair died at her home near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, six years later.

Ethel M. Fair, 1959.

Portrait Print Collection, University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center

Born in New York City in 1922, Muriel Parry came from a comfortable Upper West Side family. Educated at the elite private Horace Mann School in New York, she received a student internship at the American Geographical Society (AGS), then located at Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights.177 After graduation, she worked at the AGS as a map room assistant from 1942 to 1944.178 At the time, John K. Wright served as director. Wright had begun his career at the AGS as a librarian and knew the society’s extensive map collections extremely well. A practicing cartographer, he had edited Charles O. Paullin’s immense Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, published in 1932. Wright was also starting to publish several influential essays on the role of human nature in geography that would mark him as one of the discipline’s most creative and original thinkers.179 Parry could not have arrived at the AGS at a better time. There she received her practical training in map librarianship and was also exposed to the “quizzical, tolerant, obsessively curious” mind of John K. Wright.180 It is tempting to see Wright’s influence shaping Parry’s interest in pictorial maps. In 1944, the University of Illinois hired her to develop its map collection, a position created partly because of the “interest in maps during the war.”181 At Illinois, she completed her degree in librarianship, which she had begun at night school at Columbia, as well as her BA in geography. Three years later, she moved to Washington, DC, and took a position in the Division of Cartography and Map Intelligence in the Department of State, where she remained until her retirement in 1975.182 Several of the pictorial maps in her collection were deaccessioned from the department’s library. Always interested in geography, she became the first female graduate of George Washington University’s geography master’s program in 1952 and remained a lifelong member of the AGS.183 She died in 2004, having bequeathed more than eight hundred pictorial maps to the Library of Congress.

The pictorial map collections assembled by Fair and Parry were central parts of their lives. Both women were unmarried. Collecting so many maps at a time when it was difficult to get information about pictorial map publishing would have been a challenge and taken a good deal of time. Moreover, the collections would have needed several large map cases, which would have required considerable amounts of space in their homes. Choosing to collect pictorial maps is also revealing. Although it is not known what spurred Fair to collect pictorial maps, Parry was a map librarian and close to the heart of geography’s establishment. In a discipline then overwhelmingly made up of men and known for its preoccupation with exploration and field work, Parry was one of the few women involved in geography. Not surprisingly, she was a member of the Society of Woman Geographers. At the same time, professional geography was increasingly emphasizing scientific mapping methods. For Parry, collecting pictorial maps might have seemed a cartographic oasis away from the masculine preoccupations of geography. Whatever the stimulus, Fair and Parry bequeathed two extraordinary collections of pictorial maps to the Library of Congress, more than sufficient to provide the great majority of maps illustrated in this book.

Muriel H. Parry in the map room at the American Geographical Society, New York City, 1940.

Image from the American Geographical Society—New York Archives, American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries

The treasure trove of pictorial maps in the Library of Congress reveals the many ways that graphic artists and cartographers have used pictorial methods to map the experience of place, amuse and educate people, tell stories, convey information, and sell products. An enormous range of graphic styles were deployed, frequently creating maps that still have powerful graphic impact. Appealing to the eye and stimulating to the imagination, many of these classic American pictorial maps continue to hold our attention. Since the early 2000s, there has been a renaissance in mapping stories and telling cartographic narratives.184 In part, this development has been a reaction to scientific, GIS-based maps produced by computer. Like their forebears in the early twentieth century, graphic artists and cartographers still want to create more expressive and imaginative maps. The extraordinary collections of pictorial maps in the Library of Congress can provide examples of the ways artists tackled graphic mapping in the past. Moreover, the Internet and online map galleries provide even greater access to pictorial maps for a global audience. Pictorial maps have never been so available. This makes it all the more important to understand them.

The following six sections provide a basic categorization of American pictorial maps, highlight many of the finest produced in the United States, and show representative examples from the different genres. In organizing the maps, it must be emphasized that the categories are not rigid. Categories often overlapped. Humor, for example, appears in nearly all genres. Nevertheless, categorization provides some order. The first four sections—Maps to Amuse, Maps to Instruct, Maps of Place and Region, and Maps for Industry—deal with maps mostly published before the outbreak of World War II. The fifth section deals with Maps for War and the final section with Maps for Postwar America. In general, the chronology of the maps has been respected, although for the sake of thematic unity a few maps published after the war are included in the earlier sections. Overall, the selected works give a sense of the range, variety, and creativity of American pictorial maps during their golden age from the 1920s to the 1960s.