1949 Jones Literary Pictorial Map of the United States

This is a 1949 Amy Jones pictorial literary map of the United States. Book titles appear across the country, with at least one in each state, including Gone with the Wind, Walden, My Ántonia, and Main Street. Authors are also referenced throughout, such as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. Pictorial vignettes are scattered throughout as well, illustrating scenes and characters from many of the referenced works. Three insets are situated along the bottom border and focus on the 'New York Area', the 'Chicago Area', and the 'Boston Area'. Portraits of ten authors flank the title cartouche and include depictions of Irving, Longfellow, Poe, and Twain.

20th Century Pictorial Cartography

Pictorial qualities have been common in cartography from at least from the 16th century, when publishers like Braun and Hogenberg incorporated view-like qualities and other pictorial elements into their famous city plans. Braun and Hogenberg, and similar cartographers, issued their town books to express, not necessarily the geography of their subjects, but rather the 'essence' of the town/city. As mathematics and surveying principles became more advanced, travel increased, and the ability to translate 2 dimensional cartographic perspectives into an understanding of the actual world became commonplace, maps themselves transformed. This trend is a recognizable progression that evolved cartographic conventions from the 17th to the 19th centuries. By the late 19th century most maps had become geographical tools that illustrated the region cartographically but failed in the original raison d'être as expressed by Braun and Hogenberg, to illustrate a place's 'essence'. So, where a city map of 19th century Paris might provide a completely navigable presentation of the city, one could glean almost nothing of Paris' character from it. In the late 18th century, the first modern 'pictorial' style maps developed. These maps, like Tomas Lopez's 1788 map of Seville, attempted to provide both cartographic accuracy and pictorial elements that might convey the character of the city. In that case, Lopez incorporated pictorial vignettes to illustrate important buildings and monuments. This style became increasingly common throughout the 19th century and early 20th centuries, particularly for centers of commerce like London, Paris, and Rome, where they are often mass produced and referred to as 'monumental' maps. The style further evolved in the early to mid-20th century, when revolutionary cartographers and illustrators like MacDonald Gill, Jo Mora, Frank Dorn, Ernest Dudley Chase, and many others, combined vignette style illustrations, modern printing techniques, inspiration from Japanese printmaking and manga, and from clever satirical cartographers/artists like Fred Rose, to produce maps that once again focused on revealing the essence a place, usually, but not always, at the sacrifice of cartographic precision.

Publication History and Census

This map was designed and illustrated by Amy Jones and published by the R. R. Bowker Company in 1949. We note ten cataloged examples in OCLC which are part of the collections at the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Université Laval, the South Carolina State Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Southern Illinois University, the University of Florida, Oklahoma State University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Washington. It is rare on the private market.