Cartographica ExtraordinaireThe Historical Map TransformedDAVID RUMSEY & EDITH M. PUNTESRI Press, $79.95 cloth, ISBN 1-58948-044-9; 380 New York St, Redlands, CA 92373-8100.

This beautiful large-format book cartographically traces thediscovery, exploration, and settlement of the continental

United States by Europeans, using a small fraction of the mapsfrom the David Rumsey collection in San Francisco. As visuallyappealing and historically enlightening as it is, the book’s realvalue lies in its introduction to the 150,000 items that compriseRumsey’s collection.

Rumsey began collecting maps in earnest in the mid-1980s,focusing on North and South America between 1700 and 1900.As digital technology came of age during the end of the 20thcentury, Rumsey realized he could reconcile “the conflictingneeds of preservation ... and access” by scanning, compressing,and making the collection available to anyone with Internetaccess. The eponymous David Rumsey website turns on itshead the traditional map collection, which requires careful“storage in a library or museum vault, highly restrictive use poli-cies, and the necessity of a historian traveling to the maps.”Internet access solves “the problem of many hands taking holdof rare and delicate objects” democratically—it makes the col-lection available to perhaps three-quarters of a billion peoplearound the globe.

The book begins with the explorers’ maps, with CaptainJames Cook, Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, and Cap-tain George Vancouver. Text boxes accompany each map,allowing the authors to note, for example, La Pérouse’s use ofMercator projection (“Any straight line on a Mercator map is aloxodrome, that is, a line of constant bearing, obviously anadvantage in navigation”) and to contrast “the English obses-sion with taking and claiming land by mapping publicly its everydetail—they almost saw maps as deeds” with the Spanish viewof maps “as intellectual property to be hoarded, establishingland ownership by controlling the knowledge of where placeswere located.”

Later chapters are devoted to exploration and maps of theLouisiana Purchase, the great watersheds of the Mississippi andMissouri Rivers, and to the formal surveying of the vast interiorby land surveyors “armed with theodolites and compasses,boundary markers and chains, monuments and maps.” TheLand Ordinance of 1785 “called for public lands to be sur-veyed in reference to the geographic mile east and west alongbaselines and north along true meridians.” The authors cor-rectly note the flat impossibility of the ordinance:

townships [could not] simultaneously follow true meridians(which converge towards the poles) and have ninety degree anglesand measure an exact thirty-six square miles of area.After a sampling of maps that show cartographers struggling

to accurately show the three-dimensional shape of the land,and of maps that show the revolutionary effect of telegraphs,railroads, and canals, the book concludes with maps from major

cities, including Quebec, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles,Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Somecities have two or three maps on facing pages and allow thereader to see the changes wrought by population pressure anddevelopment. In Boston, for instance, a 1776 map shows theShawmut Peninsula “almost entirely surrounded by water” andthe Boston Common with “one edge on the shore.” In a secondmap made almost a century later, the peninsula has beenwidened and a portion of the Back Bay has been filled to createthe Public Garden; faintly drawn streets in the Back Bay sug-gest the future course of infill and development. The final map,from 1897, shows the profound influence of Frederick LawOlmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture.

The entire Back Bay had been filled and CommonwealthAvenue, a wide park-like thoroughfare, had been built throughthe middle of it to connect the Boston Common and PublicGardens to the Fens, Olmsted’s masterful marriage of recre-ation and water management.Cartographica Extraordinaire is a great holiday gift for serious

map collectors or those merely interested in the explorationand development of the United States. It is visually impressive,substantively interesting, and beautifully printed on 80 poundItalian paper to achieve extraordinary detail in the maps. Butdon’t stop with the book, which for all its finery has only 117maps to look at. Point your browser to www.davidrumsey.comand browse more than 10,000 of the most accessible, importantmaps of the 18th and 19th centuries. Zoom in on the 1876 mapof St. Louis by Richard J. Compton and Camillie N. Dry. Clickdown through several layers of resolution. Watch the mapredrawn in greater and greater detail. Soon, as if emerging fromthe mists of time, you’ll begin to see the people and horses of the19th century walking and trotting down the street. It’s almostas good as being there.

REVIEWER: Jay Kenney is an assistant editor at TBR.

Reprinted from The Bloomsbury Review®, Vol. 24, #6. © 2004, Jay Kenney. All rights reserved. May not be copied,reproduced, or transmitted in any fashion without the written consent of Jay Kenney; info@bloomsburyreview.com.