Airline Maps

In this gorgeously illustrated collection of airline route maps, Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts look to the skies and transport readers to another time. Hundreds of images span a century of passenger flight, from the rudimentary trajectory of routes to the most intricately detailed birds-eye views of the land to be flown over. Advertisements for the first scheduled commercial passenger flights featured only a few destinations, with stunning views of the countryside and graphics of biplanes. As aviation took off, speed and mileage were trumpeted on bold posters featuring busy routes. Major airlines produced highly stylized illustrations of their global presence, establishing now-classic brands. With trendy and forward-looking designs, cartographers celebrated the coming together of different cultures and made the earth look ever smaller. Eventually, fleets got bigger and routes multiplied, and graphic designers have found creative new ways to display huge amounts of information. Airline hubs bring their own cultural mark and advertise their plentiful destination options. Innovative maps depict our busy world with webs of overlapping routes and networks of low-cost city-to-city hopping. But though flying has become more commonplace, Ovenden and Roberts remind us that early air travel was a glamorous affair for good reason. Airline Maps is a celebration of graphic design, cartographic skills and clever marketing, and a visual feast that reminds us to enjoy the journey as much as the destination.

Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past. In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past. Gathered primarily from the British Library’s incomparable archives and compiled into nine chronological chapters, these one hundred full-color maps range from the iconic to the unfamiliar. Each is discussed in terms of its specific features as well as its larger historical significance in a way that conveys a fresh perspective on the past. Some of these maps were made by established cartographers, while others were made by unknown individuals such as Cherokee tribal leaders, soldiers on the front, and the first generation of girls to be formally educated. Some were tools of statecraft and diplomacy, and others were instruments of social reform or even advertising and entertainment. But when considered together, they demonstrate the many ways that maps both reflect and influence historical change. Audacious in scope and charming in execution, this collection of one hundred full-color maps offers an imaginative and visually engaging tour of American history that will show readers a new way of navigating their own worlds.

Explore the integral part that maps have to play in the fascinating history of air travel.

Poet, traveller, artist, and mystic - the story of one extraordinary woman's many lives.

For more than thirty years, the History of Cartography Project has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps. Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, continues this tradition with a groundbreaking survey of the century just ended and a new full-color, encyclopedic format. The twentieth century is a pivotal period in map history. The transition from paper to digital formats led to previously unimaginable dynamic and interactive maps. Geographic information systems radically altered cartographic institutions and reduced the skill required to create maps. Satellite positioning and mobile communications revolutionized wayfinding. Mapping evolved as an important tool for coping with complexity, organizing knowledge, and influencing public opinion in all parts of the globe and at all levels of society. Volume 6 covers these changes comprehensively, while thoroughly demonstrating the far-reaching effects of maps on science, technology, and society—and vice versa. The lavishly produced volume includes more than five hundred articles accompanied by more than a thousand images. Hundreds of expert contributors provide both original research, often based on their own participation in the developments they describe, and interpretations of larger trends in cartography. Designed for use by both scholars and the general public, this definitive volume is a reference work of first resort for all who study and love maps.

Issues for include Annual air transport progress issue.

This book studies design in airline travel posters of the 1920–1970: period. It is both a semiology and a sociocultural cultural history that explores the way advertising posters combine information and fantasy to create seductive images/texts. The book is lavishly illustrated in colour, the images constituting part of the overall argument. The field of poster studies is vast, but it is surprising how little work has been done till date on the fundamental structures – semiotic and semantic – that underpin the visual messages posters produce. Most studies of posters focus either on their history; on specific themes – politics, travel, sport, cinema; or on their status as collectable items. Though such approaches are valid, they hardly account for the specificity of the poster’s appeal or for the complex semiotic and cultural issues poster art raises. This book sets out to tackle these latter issues since they are fundamental both to the deeper significance and to the wider appeal of the poster as a cultural form. In doing so it focuses on the field of airline travel posters which developed precisely in the period of the twentieth century (1920–1970) that coincided with the onset of mass travel.