 Stephen, the latest exhibition here at the Ocean Map Library is the Golden Age of American Pictorial Maps. What is a pictorial map? Well, as the term suggests, it's a map with pictorial elements. These can range from depictions of gods and goddesses in medieval maps, the winds puffing up their cheeks and blowing the clouds, often seen in the corners, in medieval and early modern maps. And in the 20th century, they take on pictorial elements showing our culture, so they can have people walking along the roads, people driving, people flying in aeroplanes, people in ships. A whole range of pictorial elements are shown in these maps. The ones in the exhibit here, what's the history of these particular maps that are in the exhibit? Well, this exhibition aims to give an overview of the early history of the genre of pictorial maps and then particularly concentrate on the American production of pictorial maps. Are they seem to be more artistic than technical? Yes, this is the maps reflect a divide in cartographic production. On the one hand, you have scientific, objective, very technical maps. And on the other, one has artistic, more subjective, and perhaps more creative maps. And that's what we have on display here at the Ocean. The one you're standing in front of is a map of London. Tell us about that one. This is possibly the most influential pictorial map ever made. It was done by an English artist by the name of MacDonald Gill. And it was done as a commission for London Underground. Frank Pick, the director of the London Underground Commission, Gill, to produce this map to advertise the underground services. It was published in 1914, first as a very large poster map that could be posted up on the walls of the London Underground. And it proved so popular that a smaller version was produced that could be sold to the general public. So it went through several editions, the first in 1914, the one on display here, we think dates from about 1927. And it was the first of this very brightly colored type of map with a lot of detail crammed in. And it proved wildly popular in London and became influential in other parts of the world, and particularly here in the United States. And there's another one showing Boston that's behind you. Talk about that one. Yes, that one was done by Olson and Clark. It was commissioned by the Boston publishers Houghton Mifflin in 1926 as the first of three maps showing major American cities, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. And I think if you can compare the MacDonald Gill Wonderground map of London to the Olson and Clark map of Boston, you can see the similarities. Olson and Clark clearly knew MacDonald Gill's Wonderground map because they have that the map of Boston has certain similarities to the map of London. I think you can see immediately that the Boston map is crammed with detail. It's brilliant in its colors. And there are some details which are very similar to the London map, notably the roads are all picked out in yellow, which is exactly what MacDonald Gill did for London. And some of the major buildings in Boston are colored red, which is again an element that Gill did on the Wonderground map. These maps seem to take a lot of research. A lot of the buildings are drawn precisely the way they look. It must take a lot of time to go around the town and sketch all these buildings before you make them out. Yes, certainly Olson and Clark did spend many months in the Boston Athenaeum and the Boston Public Library researching the city and walking the streets, sketching the buildings, learning about the history of the town, and then they packed it into their pictorial map of the city. We've jumped the Atlantic from Boston to Paris. So tell us about the map here in front of now. Well, the exhibition is divided into several themes. And one of the themes we're showing are maps of places and regions. So we have several maps that depict cities or regions or states of the United States. We also have two maps from overseas, one of Shanghai and this map of Paris by Hungarian artist Ilonka Carats. Ilonka Carats emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. She settled in Greenwich Village in New York City and became a prominent decorative artist for many decades. In fact, she was a designer of many covers for the New Yorker magazine, so very much part of the New York artistic set. It's a very lavish map, as you can see with striking colors, particularly the reds and the yellows, and the use of gold to pick out the streets, a particular feature of this map. Now, a map like this, it may not be totally technically accurate, but it provides information of a different sort. That's right. Around the border of the map, there is a legend or key that's tied to the map and it explains all sorts of information that a tourist might want to know about Paris, such as restaurants and museums, places to go and stay or to visit. When I look at a map like this, if I'm a tourist, it helps me a lot because I can see the buildings, etc. But sometimes the distance has always thrown me off a little bit, so there seems to be a little trade-off on that. Yes, these maps were not done to scale, so there is distortion. They're reflecting the artist's vision of a place or, in this case, a city. The actual geography is played around to convey the artistic impression of the city. Stephen, we've seen how maps can help tourists and businesses, but they can also use for instructional purposes, like the one you're standing in front of now concerning Moby Dick. Tell us about that. Yes, this map was part of a series commissioned by the Harris Intertype Printing Company of Cleveland, Ohio. They commissioned several artists to do maps depicting great American and British novels. The maps actually were part of calendars they distributed to their customers. The maps are instructive in that they show major elements of great novels. This particular map was done by Edward Everett, Henry, a well-known commercial artist, and he was faced with the challenge of creating a visual representation of an American classic Moby Dick by Herman Melville. But he also had to integrate a map, and in many cases, when we deal with literary maps, we often have names of the writers just put on a map, and there's very little attempt to evoke a novel or short story. But what Everett Henry achieves here is that fusion of imagery and cartography. So in the background, we've got a map of Africa, the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean going into the Pacific, and here is the voyage of the Pequod in search of Moby Dick, and here is the Denouement when the whale sinks the vessel. And you can see that the colors are starting to turn to this vivid red as the injured whale attacks the vessel, and we have the whale here rising up. It's a very dramatic map, probably one of the finest of the pictorial literary maps that was ever created. These maps can also be used to help promote industry, and you're standing in front of one of Cleveland right now. Tell us about it. Yes, American industry was quick to realize the advertising potential of pictorial maps, and so we have an early example here of dating from 1929, just three years after the Olsen and Clark map of Boston. The map is an advertising brochure for the opening of the Cleveland Union Terminal. This was a group of office buildings, including the largest skyscraper outside of Manhattan at the time, and what this brochure was doing was advertising the centrality of the Cleveland Union Terminal for the industrial northeast. So the map shows the skyscrapers and office buildings in the center of Cleveland, near the lakefront, and then all of this transportation focusing in on the Cleveland Union Terminal. We have got rail lines, we've got automobiles, we've got Great Lakes shipping, we've got even aircraft coming in, focusing on this great central place, entitled The Capital of a New Trade Empire. So it's very much an advertising piece to suggest that locate your business in the Cleveland Union Terminal, and you will be at the center of the economic activity of Ohio and beyond. Stephen, these maps can also be used for propaganda purposes. Tell us about the one that we're standing in front of now. This map was designed by Lambert Gunther for the Tom McCann shoe stores, and as you can see from the map, it was to reassure the American public that the United States was well defended. We have the American Board Eagle flying over the map, the Stars and Stripes, very dramatic titles, safeguarding our American liberty. We have aircraft flying around the north of North America and to the south here, the American fleet at sea, and if you look closely there are patrol lines, plane patrol lines, fleet patrol lines around North America. The actual United States is picked out in red, white and blue, the colors of the flag. So it's a very patriotic image of the United States, isolated and inviolable. The map was created in 1941. It's a pre-Pearl Harbor map, and American confidence, of course, was going to be shaken enormously by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. We've come around about 50 years from the first map that we saw, the one of London. This is one of Los Angeles. Tell us about it. It's quite a change from Macdonald Gil's map of London, of Imperial London, and it's quite different also to the Clark and Olson map of Boston, whereas those two maps were full of confidence and pride in those two great cities. We now have a late 1960s image of Los Angeles, and it's really quite a dystopian vision. I think what's most striking are the colors. We've got this muddy brown at the top and this Pepto-Bismol pink here, and clearly these are the colors of the 1960s, almost psychedelic. If you start to look closely you can see a very polluted city with smoke belching from the smokestacks, congested freeways, a ship crashing into a harbor wall here. It's a very dystopian image of Los Angeles, and indeed the sun here has got a clothes peg on its nose and is looking in disgust at this dreadful urban vision. How long is the exhibit open for and where can people get more information? The exhibition is open till September 29th, and information can be found on the web at oceanmaps.org.