1938 Friedman Cartoon Pictorial Map of Florida

Sunshine, Sea Monsters, and the Open Road.

This exuberant 1938 Kenneth A. Friedman pictorial map of Florida transforms the Sunshine State into a sprawling playground of beaches, fishing, wildlife, history, and roadside adventure. Drawn to accompany Friedman's Cartoon Guide of Florida, the map combines genuine geography and tourist information with cartoons, visual jokes, and a distinctly irreverent sense of humor. Its brilliant blue, red, and white design captures Florida at a formative moment in its emergence as one of America's great tourist destinations.

A Closer Look

Florida fills the sheet, crisscrossed by a bold red highway network connecting cities and attractions from Pensacola to Key West. Friedman packs the state with tourist destinations, national monuments, colleges, military installations, historic sites, and natural landmarks, while small pictorial panels highlight attractions along both coasts. Recognizable sites include Fort Matanzas, the Ringling Museum, Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, Lake Okeechobee, Big Cypress Swamp, and the Everglades, where the proposed Everglades National Park was in the long process of being established.

Wildlife is everywhere. A Florida wildcat, black bear, manatee, alligators, birds, and other creatures inhabit the interior. At the same time, an enormous procession of individually identified fish wraps around the peninsula and continues westward along the Gulf Coast. Barracuda, tarpon, sailfish, marlin, and other prized game fish turn the surrounding waters into an illustrated catalog of Florida angling. Two green sea turtles swim beneath the title cartouche, while sailing ships, fishing boats, and whimsical sea creatures further animate the coastline.

The map's humor is inseparable from its geography. Friedman peppers the landscape with jokes, cartoons, and playful observations aimed squarely at the Florida tourist. The result is less a conventional road map than an illustrated invitation to explore the state - part travel guide, part comic strip, and part promotional celebration of Florida's increasingly important vacation economy.

The Cartoon Guide to Florida

Friedman's oversized title cartouche occupies much of the Gulf of Mexico and serves almost as a miniature comic page. A hunter fleeing a bear illustrates the observation that 'big game hunting in Florida provides all kinds of entertainment,' while another visitor encounters the 'great sea monsters' of Marineland near St. Augustine. Other cartoons joke about bathing beauties, mosquitoes, palm trees, roadside attractions, and the peculiarities awaiting visitors.

The humor reflects the larger purpose of Friedman's Cartoon Guide of Florida. Rather than presenting Florida through dry lists of hotels, roads, and destinations, Friedman turned tourism into entertainment, making the journey itself part of the joke. Even the map's decorative lettering, oversized fish, crowded vignettes, and exaggerated cartouche reinforce the sense that Florida overflows with things to see and stories to tell.

Florida's Emerging Tourist Landscape

The map appeared at an important moment in the development of modern Florida tourism. Improved highways and increasingly widespread automobile ownership were making the state accessible to a much broader segment of American travelers, while beaches, sport fishing, historic sites, wildlife, and purpose-built attractions were becoming central to Florida's public image. The bright red highways threading through Friedman's map are therefore more than graphic decoration: they represent the transportation network making this new tourist geography possible.

The treatment of the Everglades is particularly interesting. Everglades National Park is identified even though Congress authorized the park in 1934, and it would not formally be established until 1947. Friedman thus captures both the Florida already familiar to tourists and the developing landscape of attractions and protected natural areas that would define the state in subsequent decades.

Publication History and Census

Kenneth A. Friedman drew this map to accompany Kenneth A. Friedman's Cartoon Guide of Florida, published in 1938 by J. J. Augustin. Although the guidebook is represented in multiple institutional collections, the separately issued folding map does not appear to be independently cataloged in OCLC. An example retaining both the guidebook and map is held by the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Cartographers

Kenneth Albert Friedman (November 14, 1896 - February 7, 1992) was an American cartoonist and commercial artist. Born in Tatum Mine, Georgia, Friedman had moved to Jacksonville by 1920. He wrote and published Florida Highlights Illustrated, which was named the Official Florida Souvenir of the 1934 Chicago World's Fair. In 1938 Ken Friedman's Cartoon Guide of Florida was published by J.J. Augustin. He served in the Army during World War II, although we have not been able to locate detailed service records. He died in Jacksonville.   Further Details...

Johannes Jakob Augustin (October 12, 1904 - March 1, 1984) was a Jewish-American New York City based printer and publisher active in the mid-20th century. Augustin inherits the legacy of one of the world's oldest and longest running printshops. The firm was founded in 1632 by Andreas Koch in Glückstadt, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. At its founding the print shop was approved by the Danish King Christian IV and became one of the country's most important publishers - with an unusual specialization in foreign characters. In 1775, it was taken over by Jakob Johann Augustin (fl. 1775 - 1806), who renamed it Druckerei J. J. Augustin. The firm continued in the Augustin family for more than 200 years, and remains active today. Johannes Jakob Augustin Augustin was born in Glückstadt, Germany and apprenticed all aspects of the family business before perusing additional studies in art, music, and oriental languages in Innsbruck, Vienna, Paris, Leipzig, and London. He returned to Glückstadt in 1932 to work in the family press under his father, Heinrich Wilhelm Augustin (fl. 1905 - 1938). His name appears on the rolls of Jews who had their nationality annulled by the Nazi Regime in 1935. Unsurprisingly, in 1936, fleeing anti-Jewish persecution in Nazi Germany, Augustin moved to Havana, then in 1937 to New York. In New York he established the J. J. Augustin print shop at 125 E 23d St. After World War II, he reestablished connections with his family shop in Germany, and in 1950, he took over and ran remotely from his home in Long Island, New York. He died in 1984.   Further Details...

Source

Friedman, K., Kenneth A. Friedman's Cartoon Guide of Florida. (New York: J.J. Augustin) 1938.    

Condition

Very good. Light wear along original fold lines.

References

Rumsey 8770.003. OCLC 1615640 (book).