North America

Read the Transcript
This is a map of North America by a cartographic business called Allan Cartography, based in Bedford, Oregon. It is quite recent, within the last twenty years, and benefits from the fact that we’re now able to see the entire continent from space. The map does not have any particular man-made features indicated on it. It’s simply a map showing the native earth that is comprised in the North American continent with gradations of color reflecting those portions that tend to have significant rainfall and therefore are green and those portions which are dry and are therefore depicted as a yellowish-brown. It’s large, very large, and immediately makes a statement, and, I think, gives one a sense of the overall sweep of this magnificent continent that we are privileged to live on.

 

Low resolution preview for in-copyright image.

Title: North America / map prepared by Allan Cartography, Medford, Oregon, with assistance of Dr. A. Jon Kimerling, Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University

Contributors: Allan Cartography (Firm), Raven Maps & Images, A. Jon Kimerling

Call Number: SMITH IV-16

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1935587

Pictorial map of the American continent

Read the Transcript
This is a map that was produced by Standard Oil of New Jersey – ESSO, I guess it later became – and it depicts the Pan-American Highway[1], which runs from the very top of the North American continent all the way down to, uh, the bottom. Along the way, Standard Oil and the mapmaker include all manner of illustrations, each one of which has a beguiling nature to it, suggesting that travelling along the Pan-American Highway would be a wonderful and entertaining thing to do. It was a day, of course, when the great oil companies and recently organizations like Exxon and Sunoco would all publish maps of various subjects, frequently state-by-state and offer them free-of-sale to motorists who just came by to fill their gas tank. The oil companies have largely discontinued that practice in the face of modern technology and GPS systems, and it’s probably not cost effective to do it anymore. But this map reflects kind of a romantic notion that all of the Americas were now available to the motorist and it was time to get in the car and go see North and South America.

[1] “The Pan-American Highway is a network of roads stretching across the American continents and measuring about 30,000 kilometres (19,000 mi) in total length. Except for a rainforest break of approximately 106 km (70 mi) across the border between southeast Panama and northwest Colombia, called the Darién Gap, the roads link almost all of the Pacific coastal countries of the Americas in a connected highway system.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway Accessed 11 Mar. 2021.

 

Low resolution previews (front and back) for in-copyright image.

 

Title: Pictorial map of the American continent : featuring the Pan American Highway and showing some of the natural resources, scenic wonders, and points of interest

Contributor: General Drafting Company, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey

Call Number: SMITH IV-10

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1935581

Atlantic Ocean floor

Read the Transcript
This map is a map very much in our own era. In a collection of antique maps, it is kind of the contrast, if you will, that is useful to make when looking at the maps of three, four hundred years before. I particularly like this map because it essentially accentuates the ocean floor of the Atlantic – something that was clearly not known to the mapmakers of the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. And it is a wonderful map to show the cleavages in the ocean floor as the continental plates are shifting, moving apart from one another here and forcing themselves together there. A great colorful work by the National Geographic Magazine, which in many ways was the state of cartography for 50 years in the middle of the 20th Century.

 

Low resolution preview for in-copyright image.

 

Title: Atlantic Ocean floor

Contributor: National Geographic Society (U.S.). Cartographic Division

Call Number: SMITH I-28

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691590

One world

Read the Transcript
This map is not really so much a map as it is three views from space of our beautiful and somewhat endangered planet. In each of the views – and they’re side-by-side – there is a slight turning of the globe so that one sees a different part. This map or this spectacular view of the Earth from three different vantage points was produced by a company called Raven Maps. Raven Maps in the last twenty years or so has made some of the most sumptuous, colorful, and beautifully-rendered maps. This one, again, not really a map, but three views of the Earth is a beneficiary, of course, of the fact that we now have the ability to look back at our planet from space and see it through entirely new eyes.

 

Low resolution partial preview for in-copyright image.

Title: One world

Contributors: Allan Cartography (Firm), Raven Maps & Images, Stuart Allan, Karin Kunkel

Call Number: SMITH I-32

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691582

Papua men in New Guinea in their canoes hunting wild hogs; [and] : War canoes of Otaheite equipp’d for engagement as represented by Capt.n Cooke

Read the Transcript
This print reflects an engraving of a scene of probably a scene from the early 1800s, of a native from Papua New Guinea in a dugout canoe, one looks like, with side riggers to give it stability and it appears that he’s using a spear to spear wild hogs that apparently are swimming in that part of the world. This is one of a pair of prints that my wife and I purchased when we were in Auckland in New Zealand and found an old bookstore that had these for sale. We were just intrigued with the way in which it revealed a lifestyle that is obviously quite foreign to most of us living here in the United States in this century, but, exciting and revealing of the character and the rigor with which life was led in that- in that day is reflected on the print.

 

 

 

For more details, view the catalog record: https://library.villanova.edu/Find/Record/1691573