JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This is an unusual bird’s-eye view of the Great Los Angeles area, the downtown area shown larger under a magnifying glass. It forms the central image of the cover of a pamphlet on the regional planning conference for L.A. County which took place in September 1912. I have not seen an image of the map online, and checking WorldCat I see that there is only one copy of the work located in libraries world wide (and this at Harvard), and so I’ll share it here.
The metal ring of the magnifier does have the appearance of a 20-story tall wall, but it really is part of the instrument. It reminds me too of a mirror, of the mirror of the other Alice, the one from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), where Alice steps through the looking glass–in this case what we see in this lookig glass is the L.A. of the future that the planners could see.
The map is a detail from:
