Category: Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

The Coming Storm: a Map of the French “Drole de Guerre”, September, 1939

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2582

This orderly and semi-pastoral bird’s-eye view of the earliest part of the war in the west of WWII appeared in The Illustrated London News on September 30, 1939, three weeks or so after the Nazi attack on Poland. The foreground shows about 40 km of the front from the river Nied to the Saar and south to Saarburgken, with the Siegfried Line in the distance. The map shows the region into which 40 French divisions advanced from September 7-16, meeting little resistance from the outnumbered German troops who by and large fell back to more defensible positions.

Not much happened.

This period of the war has often been referred to as the “Phony War” due to the lack of action, though it wouldn’t seem so “phony” if you were killed in the process, as thousands were. Winston Churchill referred to it more as the “Twilight War”, which is far more appropriate–and this no doubt more meaningful to Churchill int he light of the HMS aircraft carrier “Courageous” being sent to the bottom by Nazi torpedoes with the loss of more than 500 sailors…there was certainly not a bloody thing “phony” in that.

The French referred to this period as the “Drole de Guerre”, which they really shouldn’t’ve done–their Saar offensive of mid-September being stunted and odd, came to a halt, and the troops called back to the doomed Maginot in October.

The Twilight War continued until late April, and then in May, it was certainly all over, as the Nazis attacked Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. And then of course came France. In just about the same amount of time that the Saar Offensive occupied, the Germany advanced and forced France to surrender, the curtain coming down on June 22. Calm before the storm, and all that–the rest of the war was more storm before the storm, until there was storm no more.

And the text accompanying the maps:

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Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria
WWI Editorial Cartoons–More Editorials Than Cartoons (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2581

Judge magazine (1881-1947) was a U.S. satirical weekly that for several decades published insightful/devastating political cartoons of the highest caliber. (Judge was a sort of knock-off of Puck magazine, started by writers and cartoonist/artists dissatisfied with that fine journal; Judge itself was done in in the same way after a fashion–Harold Ross, who served as editor of Judge for a few months in 1924 went off and started his own magazine, The New Yorker, which slowly and then rapidly cleaved away readership and talent from Judge until Judge was no more.)

It seems to me that when leafing through a volume for 1918 that Judge published more cartoons and sketches relating to World War I than cartoons for any war that I have seen in any magazine. I’m not that familiar with Judge relative to other magazines, and was very surprised to see that nearly every page has some sort of illustrated war content. In the issue for October 12, 1918–just four weeks before the end of the war–I found this image:

It is complex and at first looks to be very layered, but I think that it turns out to be not so, that it is flat, and uni-dimensional, and not very satirical–it is however very pointed, and barbed, and makes its case very quickly, in a sort of way that makes you begin to chuckle until you realize just what the content is. The work is by artist/illustrator/designer John (Johnny) Gruelle, who in the same year introduced the world to his creation of Raggedy Ann (patenting the design a few years earlier, in 1915, https://www.google.com/patents/USD47789.)

[The Judge was located at 225 5th Avenue, the Renaissance-style 13-story building converted into condos where the active selling price is about $2,670/sq foot¹, or about 3.5 million/unit, somehow making this property worth a combined $600 million or so.]

The very next page comes this condemnation of the German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II, employing the very well worn “Ages of Man” scenario:

And just a few pages later, another interesting image, this one being another entry in this blog’s collection of images of the world used in advertising/cartoons:

There were many more war-related illustrations in these few dozen pages, with these three having the most appeal and greatest impact–pretty good stuff spread out over just two or so square yards of magazine pages.

Notes:

1. See http://streeteasy.com/building/the-grand-madison

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Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria — World War I
A World Map of Heavy (1922)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas series

There have been dozens of posts on this blog about odd/unusual maps, including a number in a sub-category of world maps used in advertisements. This one, for the Adolf Bleichert Company of Leipzig, showed the reach of the company’s distribution of some of their major products, like cable cars, cranes, tramways, elevators, and the components for them. The map, typeface, and general design have a heaviness to them corresponding to the very heavy metal that the company produced. The ad appeared in the August 22, 1922 issue of Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), and occupied the entire cover of the news-weekly.

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Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
On the Heightiest Heights of Traffic Height

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I found this fabulous map of concentrations of U.S.A. (1944) traffic flow somewhere in the hinterlands. When I started to research its origin I found that the background and story of the map and its source is dealt splendidly by Eric Fischer in a 26-photo Flickr set here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/albums/72157632238833323

[Source: Interregional Highways: Message from the President of the United States Transmitting a Report of the National Interregional Highway Committee, Outlining and Recommending a National System of Interregional Highways, January 12, 1944.]

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
Nazi Propaganda and the British “Trade War”, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books

The Nazi propaganda office published this effort (printed in August 1940) with every intent of making it seem as though it was produced in the U.K. as a sober reconsideration of fighting against the Germans, casting much of the argument in terms of economics. It was a relatively soft-sell effort in a hearts-and-minds campaign, hitting its target audience with reminders of how alone everyone on the British Isles were in the hard summer of 1940.

These two maps compare the economic and trade situation of 1914 and 1939, from the Nazi perspective. In 1914, the British, “as a preliminary condition for the success of the hunger-Blockade, only achieved, however after four years if struggle during which Britain was to sustain heavy losses”. They announce with exclamation (!) that for 1939 there was:

“a totally different situation! The encirclement of Germany miscarries, leaving way for the expansion of Germany, and the way for her trade with neutral countries, especially with the Balkans and Russia…thus is the blockade against Germany a hopeless enterprise”.

The Nazis’ state that “Britain…energetically refuses to admit the hopelessness of her winning this trade war and tenaciously grasps upon all kinds of unfounded rumours…”, all the while refusing to discus the bombing of Britain or any other aspect of military war

After a dozen pages of making the case against the British position in being able to take care of itself, there is this folding quantitative display, making a diametrical-pictorial presentation of the British failings. The Nazis show that they overpower the British in the ability to supply itself with grain, flour, meat, cooking fat, cheese, eggs, sugar and vegetables–in every area, in fact, except for fish.

This is the summation of the pamphlet, the last paragraph, asking the Brits to just give it up and quit their fight.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Propaganda
Now *That’s* a Front-page Newspaper Map…(1863)

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This fine map popped out at the warehouse today–the New York Herald, September 10, 1863, with a fantastic full-page/front-page map of the theater of war in Georgia (and southern Tennessee and south-western North Carolina), back when newspapers were newspapers. But the map centers on Georgia, and comes just a week before the second bloodiest battle of the war at Chickamauga. (The town appears right underneath the label for “Chattanooga”.)

My own Hendersonville appears at the extreme east portion of the map in North Carolina, just north of the South Carolina line. Most of the mountains seem to not make a very formidable entrance on this map (though Cold Mountain is seen just to the north-west of Hendersonville), and I think it is somewhat deceiving. I’ve driven the mountains a lot in Western North Carolina and often thought of slogging around the region in the foothills, avoiding all of the mountains that I was driving through which really didn’t show up on this map. There’s a reason that there wasn’t that much in the way of conflict in this region of WNC, northern SC, and eastern Tennessee–of course there wasn’t much worth winning, but marching through the mountains would have been a major piece of bad country to go through.

In any event, this was a good map for northern and central Georgia, introducing northern readers to an advancing front of the war.

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An A to Z-ery of Love and its Associative Bits: the Map of Matrimony, 1879

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2568

Rhinoceros nunquam victus ab hoste cedit–the rhino never turns away defeated from the enemy

And so we begin a look an an allegorical map¹ of matrimony with an allegorical statement comparing marriage to a rhino–this is a first for me, and it may also be an original application of the epigram to (human) marriage. I guess in the mind’s eye this looks as though it might be so, given there’s really no possibility of dealing with a charging rhino weather the Big Boy is charging in happiness or fear, anger or love–it is just going to get you.

The map has a little more guile than this, enumerating the good points of marriage along with some of the bad–surprisingly these states nearly fill an alphabet, which is pretty unusual given that there are only about 50 states and it covers 17 letters (with nothing at all for the last four letters).

And so the carto-geographical indulgence of the alphabet of marriage: Acceptance, Cape of; Brides Bay; Comfort, Cape of; Delight, Cape of; Envy Point; Fickelness, Shoals of; Hope, Cape of Good; Introduction, Bay of; Jealousy, Isle of; Lawyers, Land of; Observation Point; Paymoney Point; Reflection, Whirlpool of; Scandals, Sea of; Tattlers, Land of; Undercurrent Bay; Vanity, Mount of.

[This is clearer when expanded. Source: the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/resource/g9930.ct003856/]

And the full version:

Notes

1. Map of Matrimony on Mercators projection shewing to timid lovers the orbit of affection to the true haven of conjugal happiness. (In upper margin: Puzzle : the second expedition of the Vessel Pinta.)

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Alphabets — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas
The End is Near for You: Germany, May, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This incredible map appeared in the May 19, 1945 issue of the Kolnischer Kurier, It was published in Koln, in German, for Germans, but was printed and distributed as news and propaganda by the advancing U.S. Army. It is remarkable that at the tail end of the final offensive there were such forward-thinking people planning in terms like this, dealing with a newly-conquered enemy and trying to organize the thoughts of the population.

[The first twelve issues of the Kolnischer Kurier were published by the Americans; the rest of the newspaper (issues 13-62, 1945-6) were published by the British.]

The map leaves little to the imagination except for what total defeat might bring:

[Kolnischer Kurier map, 19 May 1945, via Veri Josef Weber http://veriweber.de/der-pulverdampf-hat-sich-verzogen/]

The newspaper was extraordinarily, reporting on the Tötungsanstalt Hadamar/Hadamar Euthenasia Center in 1945, the Bergen-Belsen trials at Luneburg in September 1945, the Nuremberg trials (November 1945-September 1946), and much else. Deserving a separate mention is a piece by Thomas Mann on the German concentration camps published nearly on the day of German surrender–Mann makes explicit, personal claims that all Germans are responsible for the atrocities of the concentration camps. (Mann would make a radio address on May 8th exactly on the German soul and the concentration camps, and culpability, and blame, and the morality of the war.

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A Glorious if Not Accurate Map of Ocean Currents 1675

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I’m interested in this fabulous map,“Die Ebbe und Fluth auff einer flachen Landt-Karten fürgestelt” by Eberhard Werner Happel. Happel’s (1647-1690) map was a very early thematic effort at depicting the course of the currents of the oceans, and may or may not have been very heavily dependent upon the work of Athanasius Kircher, who produced a remarkably similar map, but a few years earlier.

[Source: Pirnceton University http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/thematic-maps/quantitative/hydrography/hydrography.html

Happel was a polymath much in the line of Kircher, and as gifted as he was (producing novels and popular works on the natural sciences in a number of books numbering many thousands of pages) he was not at the Kircher-level of polymath. Perhaps he was more on the line of a sub-Robert Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy) though not quite there, either. He did an extraordinary amount of writing in his slim 43 years, though not necessarily at the highest level of intellectual achievement (as with the other two).

In any event, the map is beautiful.

And the details of high artistic forms:

and so:

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When U.S. Forces Occupied Los Angeles (1848)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

[Detail of a one square inch area in the original.]

This lovely map has a few tiny bits of unexpectedly weird details–I mean they’re historically accurate and all, it is just that removed and presented apart from the context of the rest of the map the details take on a peculiar–and attractive–surreal quality.

[Detail of a one square inch area in the original.]

The map is a Sketch of the Battle of Los Angeles Upper California fought between the Americans and Mexicans, Jan 9, 1847, and published in 1848. The map depicts the grounds of the Battle of the San Gabriel River, a victory for the United States, which resulted in the retaking of Los Angeles from the Californos a couple of days later, on January 10.

Full explanations of the battle can be found in a number of places, but this one is pretty concise and clear.

,

Origin: EMORY, W[illiam] H[emsley] (1811-1887). Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, Including Parts of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers…Made in 1846-7, with the Advanced Guard of the “Army of the West.” Washington: Senate Executive Document No. 7 [30^th Congress, 1^st Session] Wendell and Van Benthuysen, Printers, 1848. (13 x 22.2 cm; 5-1/8 x 8-3/4 inches). A bit of foxing, otherwise a good copy of this map.

This map is available from our blog bookstore, here.

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American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

Category: Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas

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