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On Maps

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  • A splash of colour

    A splash of colour

    Few things in my corner of the rare booktrade seem to cause as much confusion and consternation as the colouring of maps: when, by whom and why? Commercially viable colour-printing didn’t really take off until the mid nineteenth-century, and there’s...

  • Dawn of the folding world

    Dawn of the folding world

    The presentation of maps - how they were bought and sold and how they were first used - is something I think about rather a lot (far too much?) It’s important to recall that virtually all early map-makers were businessmen...

  • Mapping the Great Binge

    Mapping the Great Binge

    I threatened to come back to thematic and statistical cartography in an earlier post. It does sound like a threat – dry as dust – but actually the development of this sort of map-making in the second half of the...

  • A cadger's map of Kent

    A cadger's map of Kent

    Keeping on with the theme of Victorian social history, in a recent house-call I picked up a latish edition of John Camden Hotton’sSlang Dictionary, 1885. Not of great commercial value, but irresistible. Hotton himself is fun - a bookseller, publisher...