The Penrose Annual 45 1951

Maps with the News is a lively assessment of the role of cartography in American journalism. Tracing the use of maps in American news reporting from the eighteenth century to the 1980s, Mark Monmonier explores why and how journalistic maps have achieved such importance. "A most welcome and thorough investigation of a neglected aspect of both the history of cartography and modern cartographic practice."—Mapline "A well-written, scholarly treatment of journalistic cartography. . . . It is well researched, thoroughly indexed and referenced . . . amply illustrated."—Judith A. Tyner, Imago Mundi "There is little doubt that Maps with the News should be part of the training and on the desks of all those concerned with producing maps for mass consumption, and also on the bookshelves of all journalists, graphic artists, historians of cartography, and geographic educators."—W. G. V. Balchin, Geographical Journal "A definitive work on journalistic cartography."—Virginia Chipperfield, Society of University Cartographers Bulletin

When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen's “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau's underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller's geoscope. Postwar artists and architects have used photography, film, and other media to imagine and record the world as a wonder of collaborative entanglement—to translate the world for the world. In this book, Janine Marchessault examines a series of utopian media events that opened up and expanded the cosmos, creating ecstatic collective experiences for spectators and participants. Marchessault shows that Edward Steichen’s 1955 “Family of Man” photography exhibition, for example, and Jacques Cousteau’s 1956 underwater film Le monde du silence (The Silent World) both gave viewers a sense of the earth as a shared ecology. The Festival of Britain (1951)—in particular its Telekinema (a combination of 3D film and television) and its Live Architecture exhibition—along with Expo 67’s cinema experiments and media city created an awareness of multiple worlds. Toronto’s alternative microcinema CineCycle, Agnès Varda’s 2000 film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game (geoscope), representing ecologies of images and resources, encouraged planetary thinking. The transspecies communication platform the Dolphin Embassy, devised by the Ant Farm architecture collaborative, extends this planetary perspective toward other species; and Finnish artist Erkki Kurenniemi’s “Death of the Planet” projects a postanthropocentric future. Drawing on sources that range from the Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes to the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Marchessault argues that each of these media experiments represents an engagement with connectivity and collectivity through media that will help us imagine a new form of global humanism.

The Festival of Britain in 1951 transformed the way people saw their war-ravaged nation. Giving Britons an intimate experience of contemporary design and modern building, it helped them accept a landscape under reconstruction, and brought hope of a better world to come. Drawing on previously unseen sketches and plans, photographs and interviews, The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People travels beyond the Festival's spectacular centrepiece at London's South Bank, to show how the Festival made the whole country an exhibition ground with events to which hundreds of the country's greatest architects, artists and designers contributed. It explores exhibitions in Poplar, Battersea and South Kensington in London; Belfast, Glasgow and Wales; a touring show carried on four lorries and another aboard an ex-aircraft carrier. It reveals how all these exhibitions and also plays, poetry, art and films commissioned for the Festival had a single focus: to unite 'the land and people of Britain'.

The period from the end of the 19th century to 1960 was one of significant change and development in the popular magazine industry. The growth of an interlocking railway system in the earlier part of the 19th century had presented new distribution opportunities for magazine publishers, who quickly exploited them. Later in the century, the introduction of cheaper paper and smoother print surfaces enabled the development of half-tone printing. Other factors, such as the introduction of rotary presses and mechanical typesetting, also had a significant impact on costs and speed of production.