 Matthew, tell us about this new exhibit at the Ocean Map Library. This exhibit is designed to highlight our manuscript treasures. A manuscript is a map that's drawn by hand. And every single one of these maps is a work of individual art. And so we decided to call the show the Art of the Hand Drawn Map. When people hear the word manuscript, they usually think of something that's written like text, but these are not obviously text. Now tell us about that. Well, yes. Originally everything was written out by hand. Long hand. And then converted to print. And the same thing applies for maps, that when we make a printed map, it first of all has to be drafted in some kind of manuscript, like the maps that we have right here, where we have a manuscript map, a hand-drawn original draft, complete with instructions to the engraver. So engrave to this line, engrave to this line, and engrave to this line. And then the engraver took this image and then converted it on a lithographic stone to make this map. Matthew, the first stop on our tour is a very early map of southern Maine. Tell us about it. This map is an example of the kind of map that would be made when there really wasn't much of an interest in an area. If you have no interest, then there's no reason to make a printed map. And so people would make manuscript maps and then circulate them for their own interest, but without distributing them widely through the print marketplace. So what specific area does this map show? This map shows the coast of Maine from York all the way up to Penobscot Bay, and all the towns that have been settled, or at least established, along the coast up to about Falmouth. And then you have, going up into the interior, these York, Cumberland and Lincoln Counties holding the promise of a future for Maine that may not even have been realized yet. The map was made by a man called John Small. He was a land surveyor from Scarborough, so the local archives have a lot of his work, and he made this map in April 1761 for Sir Francis Bernard, the governor of Massachusetts, who was interested in Maine lands. Bernard was trying to pay himself by taking land grants in lieu of actual payment from the legislature. Bernard then hired him to make a plan of a route from Fort Weston in Augusta all the way up to Quebec, and having survived two wars, including the high death rate on the Louisbourg expedition from disease, not from conflict. Going up somewhere in this area, he was accidentally shot and killed by the leader of the expedition who mistook his bear for a hat for an actual bear. So the next up on our tour, we've ended up in Japan. Tell us about this map. Yes. Well, by the early 19th century, Japan had a very flourishing print culture. A lot of books, a lot of images were being printed for the mass market. But the elites in Japan still clung onto older manuscript forms of imagery and writing. And this is an example of such a map. The original of this was prepared in 1785, and copies were immediately distributed in manuscript, whereas you actually have a large production of these. So this is not something that was rare, it's mass produced, but it's mass produced for an elite. It shows a geography that goes back to the 16th century, when a Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, was trying to carry favor at the Chinese court, and he mapped the world with China and East Asia at the center, putting South America off to the right, and Europe and Africa to the left. And this became the dominant form for these kinds of maps in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese culture throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. When they made copies of these maps, did they sort of get less accurate as they went along on the copies? Many did, but you know what? So did printed books. Whenever you re-set the type of a printed book, you introduce errors. So the printed book was always the first edition that was the most correct, the most regarded by scholars. With manuscripts, you actually have a whole series of practices that allow you to make sure that you don't introduce errors as you copy, and the Japanese were very good at that. So you might think there's going to be lots of errors, but the real errors actually come from taking this kind of work and putting it into print, where the language gets very confused, it's very hard to translate now. So changes do happen, lines get a bit more squiggly. I suppose if you look at New England Coast, it looks weird to modernize because it's based partly on the 16th century original, but also because this is not important, so they squeal a bit. So lots of factors go into these things. So maps can be printed on a lot of different things, but this one's pretty unusual. Tell us about it. Well, yes, this one is a map of Somerset County. It's very faded now. But the interesting thing is that whoever made it, they didn't sign it, had a large roll of wallpaper to hand. And that's what they drew this on the back of some very nice wallpaper. Maps are made for a lot of different purposes. What type of map is this? This is a map made of property. It was commissioned by the Kennebec proprietors to again be given to Sir Francis Bernard, who was then governor, maybe to carry favor with him or to try to promote their own activities. But essentially it shows the lines of very large pieces of property, running from the sheepskirt at Wiskasset across to the Kennebec. So this is a town of Poundall-Burra, founded by the Kennebec proprietors in 1752 as Frankfurt Plantation. They renamed it Poundall-Burra in 1760 after Thomas Poundall, the late governor, or he's the former governor. And then in 1802 Dresden and Alna separated and the remainder of Poundall-Burra gets renamed Wiskasset. So today this covers the three towns of Wiskasset, Dresden and Alna. Was this a manuscript map or a printed map? Good question. This is manuscript, but the really interesting thing about this map is that it says, Thomas Johnston Sculp. Johnston is known for engraving a number of maps in the early 18th century. He did everything. He built organs, he painted houses, and he engraved copper plates for printing. Whether he actually drew this map, I don't know, but he certainly, it seems from this note, Thomas Johnston Sculp, Sculp means engraved by. So it seems implied that this is a neat copy that was going to go to an engraving. Matthew, maps usually start with a survey and we have an example here of a textbook for survey students. Tell us about it. Sure. In the 18th century textbooks were very expensive. So students would learn surveying from a teacher and they would make their own textbook by copying the teachers. So in this case we have a case where the teacher was a German, Johann Christoph Schlambach, who had a student, I think, called Friedrich Wilhelm von Burst. And the student, I think, made this. It's unclear because it's not properly signed. It could be the other way around. It could be Johann Schlambach was the student and von Burst was the teacher. Anyway, but what you have in this glorious work in which the images are these beautiful water-colored images and a rather chicken-scratching text is a very detailed statement of the mathematics behind surveying and also the actual process. This image in particular shows the stages of moving a plain table, which literally is a piece of wood on a tripod that you draw on directly, moving a plain table along the edge of a river and what you do in order to survey the sinuosity of the river. Today in the age of GPS and satellite imagery, are the techniques that were used by the manuscript map makers still in use today? They are actually. There is a growing number of people who reject digital mapping and they want to get back to the feel and the craft of manuscript mapping. There's a group in Britain called the Hand-Drawn Map Collective that tries to popularize individual making of maps. There's also in Britain another program encouraging people to make maps of their own parishes, rural towns, whether it is through quilting, through drawing, through whatever kind of mechanism but is all done by hand as a community, as an exercise of community building. We've seen several nice maps here today, interesting ones. What other treats do you have that we haven't seen? There are many really interesting maps in this exhibit and I'm saying that because they really are interesting, not because this is what I do. We have a map that was probably held certainly seen by Napoleon Bonaparte as part of the work planning for the invasion of Britain, which never happened. We have maps by a juvenile Winslow Homer, the great artist. We have a map by an 18-year-old George Washington before he became a military officer and first president in the United States. He was a land surveyor, like many other people at the time. We have a lot of maps made by people who we don't know but who have left us these wonderful expressions of their own particular skills, some of which are really good and beautiful and some of which are not so good, but which nonetheless gives great insight into who these people were, who made and who used these incredible unique items. The exhibit opens on October 16th. How long is it up for? It runs until February 26th, 2015. I'd like to have it run longer, but manuscript maps are ready to be delicate and the light exposure is not good for them. And if you want more information, ours and that sort of thing, where can they get more information? On the Map Library website, which you can go to either two ways, either usm.main.edu.maps or OSHA maps or one word, O-S-H-E-R-M-A-P-S.org. Either way you'll come to the website, you can get open hours, order activities and a complete online version of this show.