Category: Maps

“I began painting maps to invent my own complicated narrative about the way I see and feel about the world. I wanted to list what I know about the world from memory, from impressions, from media, and from general information overload. These are paintings of distortions.” — Paula Scher
Since the early ’90s, Scher has been painting colorful depictions of regions of the globe, covered from top to bottom by a scrawl of words (to the left is the details from the 2008 painting “Tokyo”). She has recently published a book of her maps. There’s an interview with her here and large glorious pictures of her maps on her website.

I’m still in Vermont, and while we’ve been here, no matter where we go, my sister seems to want to stop at every antique shop, barn and garage sale along the way. I must confess there’s usually nothing of interest for me, but much that would suit her Victorian-era house. In particular she’s been looking for some extra chairs for her dining room as well as frames for some old maps she’s acquired. Yesterday we went to a large estate sale and had an unexpected find, something even I was enamored with! It was a small pile labeled “Beatrice’s Life, $10” and included 3 large, framed diplomas, several photographs of Beatrice, and what looked like a school workbook. While my sister examined the frames, I idly picked up the book — and out fell a folded piece of paper and a small leather pouch. The workbook, with the title page “History of Vermont, ’26,” was full of beautiful handwriting and hand-drawn maps of Vermont. The folded piece of paper turned out to be a series of maps of Vermont.

As my sister pulled out the tape measure to check the frame sizes, I opened the little pouch. It measures 2×1-1/2″ and contains tiny calling cards (1-5/8×7/8″) with just a name on them.

The frames were just what my sister was looking for, so off we went with the whole package. Once we got back home, I examined the workbook in detail. At the bottom of the large map, it says “The Sheet and County of State Maps for blackboard exercises, taken from the NEW VERMONT HISTORICAL READER furnished free with every copy of the book… Every pupil should have one. The sheets can be mounted on cardboard or enlarged by the scholar. The teacher can require villages, mountains, roads, etc., to be marked in each town, so as to get the pupil familiar with his own locality county and state.” The workbook, dated 1926, was the result of these blackboard exercises. The New York Public Library has digitized the 1903 version of The Vermont Historical Reader And Lessons on the Geography of Vermont, with Notes on Civil Government.
Of the diplomas in the frames — one was for finishing an advanced course of the Palmer Method of Business Writing, where she was awarded a “Certificate for Superior Ability in Rapid Muscular Movement Commercial Penmanship.”

Last week, my sister and I drove from New Mexico to Vermont. During our long days in the car, we used a combination of guide books, maps, road signs and our smart phones to find out about the towns we were going through. One town in Ohio is called “Twinsburg” and described in our AAA guide as

Settled in 1817, Twinsburg was originally called Millsville. In 1819 two identical twin merchants from Connecticut gave land for a public square and funded a school in exchange for the town naming rights… Today Twinsburg is the site of the area’s largest annual gathering of twins.

This description led to a search for other twin gatherings and I stumbled across a website called They Travel and Draw, with mappish paeans to places all over the world. The one above is Dinara Mirtalopova’s rendition of Twinsburg.