Reading between the Gridlines

A few weeks ago, I had the wonderful opportunity, thanks to generous funding from the Philip Lee Phillips Society and the Library of Congress Professional Association, to attend the Material Foundations of Map History, 1450-1900, course held by the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia. The course was taught by Matthew Edney, Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine and Project Director for the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a new(ish) map librarian, I relished the opportunity to learn from a respected scholar in map history, meet like-minded colleagues from around the world, examine special collections materials at the University of Virginia Library, and emerge from the Madison Building basement to see the sunlight (while it’s good for the materials, working in a reading room with no windows has its drawbacks).

This course enabled me to think about maps – and to look at them – in new ways. Our primary focus was on materiality, i.e. the physical characteristics of maps: size, paper, format, printing method, color, etc. While these features don’t tell the whole story of a map and its function in society, it’s amazing what you can learn about the networks of people and contexts – to use Edney’s term, “spatial discourses” – in which maps are produced, distributed, and consumed by examining the object itself. In this post I’ll apply a few of these ideas by exploring maps of my home state of Michigan in the Geography and Map Division collections.

Modes of Mapping

Not all that glitters is gold, and not everything that looks like a sailing chart functions like one. Maps are made for a variety of specific purposes by a wide range of communities and specialized groups within a given society, so of course, maps will take different forms.

Most of us are familiar with general geographical maps; this first map, North Western and Michigan Territories, is a great example. The lovely title, contrasting colors (applied by hand), broad scope, and fairly limited detail indicate that this map was intended for general reference purposes. To me, it looks like an atlas plate, and may have been published as one, although upon physical examination I don’t see any indication that it was bound into a book.

Not all maps, however, are made for general geographical reference. The map below is a property map, which documents land claims in a portion of southeast Michigan around Detroit. While physically much larger, this map covers a much smaller area. The information on the map is restricted to property boundaries, landowners’ names, descriptions of tracts and the natural resources, and basic geographical reference points like rivers and roads. Unlike the geographical map above, it’s not fitted within a grid of latitude and longitude; relative space is what matters.

Map Printing and Production

This Wayne County property map is a manuscript map, meaning it was drawn by hand. This specific map was copied, by hand, from a sketch by Robert King, presumably also a manuscript. Since property maps typically have a small circulation – perhaps only some of the landowners, the local records office, and in this case, the US Department of State (as Michigan was still a territory in 1812 when the map was printed) would have needed copies – producing and copying this map in manuscript was faster and cheaper than contemporary printing methods.

If your 19^th-century map was intended for wide public distribution, however, the large volume of maps would have made it worth your while to get it printed. Both of the maps below are from general geographical atlases, produced for the general reader, student, family, or library. This first one was printed from a copper plate, a very common method used for maps for several hundred years. Copper plates could be engraved or etched, both of which allowed for fine detail. This type of printing didn’t permit printing large areas of ink, so the lakes are filled in with dense rows of thin lines, and the counties are colored by hand, likely using a stencil.

This map was printed using cerography, a method by which wax was applied to plates, a design engraved, and then a thin layer of metal adhered to the surface. This thin layer could then be removed and used as a printing plate. Cerography was a common method used for maps in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but less common for other types of media.

By the late 19^th century, lithography – a planar printing method using stones – became widespread. Lithographic printing is cheap, which makes it more worthwhile to do small print runs. As a result, local maps with a limited consumer market became worth the cost of printing. Color printing is also much easier to do with lithography, and complex layers of color could be applied in a process called chromolithography, as seen in this beautiful panoramic map of Lansing.

Maps in Books

While many maps are published as single sheets, and others are bound in atlases, still others are published in books, to serve a variety of purposes including reference and illustration. Common library practice beginning in the 19^th century saw many maps separated from the books they were published in, generally for storage and preservation purposes. This map, for example, was produced for Doggett’s railroad guide in 1848. The blank strip down the middle of the page shows how it could be bound into a text block without losing a portion of the map in the book’s gutter.

Books provide important context which can get lost when the map is stored separately. Thankfully, catalog records can help reunite maps with their original tomes. As noted in the record, the map below was originally included in Nouveaux voyages de Mr. le baron de Lahontan, dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, a travel narrative published in The Hague in 1703. The text of the book explains Lahontan’s sources, which he claimed included a map drawn for him by a group of people called the Gnacsitares.

I took a field trip to the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room to view the original book, which is tiny; the map would have to be folded up to fit within, and indeed several folds are visible.

The photo below shows how a separately-printed map can be bound into a text in a way that allows it to be unfolded.

Though I’ve seen some of these maps before, I’m now able to look at them with fresh eyes. Much of my work involves introducing people to the Geography and Map Division’s rich collections for the first time. Equipped with everything I learned in this course, I hope to enrich their experiences of these maps with information about the processes involved in their creation, the audiences for which they were intended, and the contexts in which they were published.

Learn More

The Geography and Map Reading Room Reference Collection contains many books about the history of maps and map printing; a few are listed here:

• Five centuries of map printing, 1975, by David Woodward
• The History of cartography series, 1987-, edited by J.B. Harley and David Woodward
• Cartography : the ideal and its history, 2019, by Matthew Edney