Stephen J. Hornsby

I've always loved those little maps you get for free at tourist destinations that have lots of little comical people doing touristy things on plan clearly not drawn to scale. In fact, when I was a teenager I had two pictorial map posters, one of Greenwich, CT (the town next to my own where I attended high school) and one of Williamsburg, VA (where we went on lots of vacations before eventually moving there). Stephen Hornsby breaks down the history of pictorial maps in this book which he says peaked in the United States from the 1920s to the 1960s. Pictorial maps were used for education, for civic and industrial promotion campaigns, and to help people on the homefront keep up with the battles of World War II among other things. Although this is a richly-illustrated coffee table book, my one complaint is that the images were often still too small to see the details. Nevertheless this is a fun and interesting book about an esoteric topic of my interest.… (més)

This is an attractive selection of pictorial maps, mostly from the interwar period, with a few stragglers finding their way in from the fifties and sixties. Generally produced as advertising or public relations curios by tourist bureaus and corporations, the genre is an interesting straddling of art, design, and cartography. Ultimately, though, the book is frustrating because the often-minute captions and drawings are too small to be legible, even in a large-format coffee table book. On rare occasions, the maps are reproduced across two pages, but even then not everything is legible. Admittedly, this problem is probably insoluble within the constraints of having a book of manageable size, but it's unfortunate that the maps cannot be fully appreciated here.… (més)