I have featured maps on this blog many times: maps allegorical, anthropomorphic, and antique, maps featuring octopuses, spiders, relationships and myriad places and perspectives. An ongoing exhibition of pictorial maps at the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library has inspired me to examine this particular cartographical creation yet again–along with a recent ebay score of one of my favorite local pictorial maps, Alva Scott Garfield’s “Scott-Map of Salem, Massachusetts”. Maps with pictographic elements go way back, but the Osher exhibition is focused on the mid-twentieth century, identified as “The Golden Age of American Pictorial Maps”. I wanted to confirm this chronology in my own mind, so I began perusing the larger collection of pictorial maps at the David Rumsey Map Collection: casual browsing led me down the virtual rabbit hole, of course! Clearly you can map anything in a pictorial way: plants, animals, commodities, imaginary places, infrastructure and…
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Lenora's Culture Center and Foray into History 