Word & Image

A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20

Bound images: maps, books, and reading in

material and digital contexts

Jordana Dym & Carla Lois

To cite this article: Jordana Dym & Carla Lois (2021) Bound images: maps, books, and reading in
material and digital contexts, Word & Image, 37:2, 119-141, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2020.1801262

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1801262

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Bound images: maps, books, and reading in
material and digital contexts
JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS

Abstract The dominant practice in Western map studies has been to consider maps as “sovereign,” that is, as individual images
separated from the material context of their production, circulation, and consumption. Book studies, also, have generally overlooked
maps when considering graphic elements such as engravings and photographs. Yet many maps are located within, and contribute to,
the larger arguments of books of all kinds, including histories, geographies, travel accounts, and novels. This article asks what
changes theoretically and in practice when we dethrone the “sovereign map” and engage with maps as “bound images,” a hybrid
graphic and textual part of the stories told by authors and publishers which is experienced by readers in book form through
materiality, context, and significance. By way of conclusion, we offer an approach to analyzing maps in context, and an appendix
with initial guiding questions.

Keywords history of cartography, material culture, reading, history of the book, printing culture, modernity

I. Introduction: the lay of the land
Maps have been part of Western codices and printed books for
a millennium, increasing in number, size, and complexity with
the double graphic and print revolutions of the fifteenth and
nineteenth centuries.1 It is not surprising that maps are ubi­
quitous in certain book genres, from atlases and travel
accounts to histories and adventure literature. Place, space,
and territory matter considerably in each. Less expected,
perhaps, is maps’ presence in novels, bibles, and other less
“geographic” works; many of these also boast maps made by
the author or commissioned by publishers to complement or
illustrate the argument being made through text, whether in
a first appearance, translation, or later edition. Robert Louis
Stevenson even claimed that a map the author originally drew
(and lost, and reconstructed) inspired his bestselling children’s
adventure tale, Treasure Island (1883).2 In a word, maps are
important constituent parts in books of all kinds.
Yet, as Jim Akerman noted twenty-five years ago, “[w]e can
easily forget that the vast majority of early printed maps
reached their readers from inside books.”3 There are many
reasons for this act of continual forgetting. In the case of maps
and books, this “we” means more than scholars. Maps
retained in their original context may be a challenge to find
or access, thanks to traditions in publishing, collections, and
scholarship. Publishers inconsistently include maps in a book’s
table of contents or index, only sometimes indicating the
presence and, less frequently, the title of a volume’s “maps,”
“figures,” “engravings,” or “plates.” Some separate “maps”
from “illustrations”; others include them among the more
generic “plates” (figures 1–3). Presumably, maps’ hybrid nat­
ure, specifically their delivery of both textual and graphic
information, makes them too picture-like to be consistently
presented as texts and too textual to be treated only as
images.4 A modern library catalogue book-entry takes its
cue, and shortens Early Modern book titles, removing their
boasts of the maps within. Item subject-headings, too, largely
fail to point readers to maps as book elements, even as they
identify caricature, engraving, illustration, and graphic arts.
Librarians follow a trail blazed by publishers.
For centuries, curatorial and collection practices have pri­
vileged consideration of maps as standalone objects, rather
than bound images. In practice, maps have been separated
from books for preservation or profit, obscuring origins if no
cross-referenced catalogue record was created, and privileging
the study and display of the sheet.5 Historically, the divide may
date to a division of labor between scribe and illuminator,
author and illustrator, publisher and mapmaker, and printer
and engraver. Today it continues in the parallel and often
siloed worlds of separate markets, professional associations,
and scholarly organizations dedicated to the collection, pre­
servation, study, and display of books and maps. Many librar­
ians and collectors continue to acquire maps as standalone
images, and remove them from books, whether in an effort to
flatten and preserve them or to turn them better into objects
on display, with varying interest in their bibliographic origin.
Scholars, shaped and directed in part by these publishing, col­
lection, and curation practices, traditionally tend to treat maps as
individual images, whether approaching them from the perspective
of history of science, history of cartography, history of art, or
material or visual studies. Using individual maps as sources, nine­
teenth- and twentieth-century historians of cartography specialized
in analyzing mapmakers’ careers, map origins, and content, the
development of map genres, and the effect of changing technolo­
gies on map content, production, and circulation. This took place
both in positivist studies of maps as scientific objects and in more
recent studies of maps as bearers of cultural, political, and historical
context whose size and form shape their use, or “social lives.”6 Art
historians, including Svetlana Alpers and Barbara Stafford, began
to study the pictorial aspect and geographic content of maps rather
than a relationship to external text.7 Sometimes fruitful (and

WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 37, NO. 2, 2021 119

https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2020.1801262

# 2021 Taylor & Francis

Figures 1–3. Instructions to printers and binders vary in how they group or separate maps from other graphic materials in books. Maps might be included
with all “figures,” as in François Caron and Joost Schouten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam, trans. Sir Robert Manley (London:
printed by Samuel Broun & John de l’Ecluse, 1663) *EC65 M3147 663c , Houghton Library, Harvard University (figure 1); among all “plates,” as in Narrative
of the surveying voyage of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, Appendix to Volume II (London: Henry Colburn, 1839), front matter (figure 2) and as distinct from
“general illustrations,” as in H. H. Hardesty, Historical hand-atlas, illustrated: containing … twelve farm maps, and History of Jay County, Indiana (Chicago and Toledo
[Ohio]: H. H. Hardesty & Co., 1881), front matter (figure 3).
Figures 2 and 3 are available at Archive.org if the press wishes to include the links:
2: https://archive.org/details/narrativeofsurve02voya/page/n11/mode/2up)
3: https://archive.org/details/historicalhandat00hhha)

sometimes sterile) disputes on defining what precisely qualifies as
a map—partly due to maps’ combination of text and image, and
difficult-to-describe presentation styles which vary from linear and
diagrammatic to panoramic and landscape—surely have not
helped.8 Scholars of book history, for their part, traditionally failed
to consider maps among other types of image.9
Building on established paths, map scholarship today largely
continues to privilege maps as self-contained items—or sover­
eign, as Tom Conley phrased it in translating Christian
Jacob’s book, l’Empire des cartes (“Maps’ Empire”)—rather
than as a contributing element of a particular document or
bibliographic genre.10 The International Conference on the
History of Cartography (ICHCH) (1964–) and the Newberry
Library’s Kenneth Nebenzahl Jr. Lectures (1972–) each bring
together influential scholars every two years for a public con­
ference (with the latter producing volumes that establish sub-
fields). Perusing each program reveals the breadth covered in
such a thematic trajectory.11 This approach has no doubt
reached a peak in the six-volume encyclopedic History of
Cartography project, which traces maps within regional, publish­
ing, thematic, and technological developments, but not expli­
citly within the history of books.12 Having elicited the
knowledge of leading scholars on individual documents and
document types (marine charts, topographic maps, aerial map­
ping), comparison and analysis within an object or object
genre is a logical next step.13 Important individual case studies
of maps in particular texts, book genres, and publishing tradi­
tions have considered, but not fully addressed, the methodo­
logical implications of examining maps in documentary
context, rather than as items with an independent trajectory.14
This article draws on almost a decade’s worth of conversa­
tions, supported by lively debates and workshops, to ask what
changes theoretically and in practice for all these constituents
when we dethrone the “sovereign map” and engage with maps
in books as “bound images,” a hybrid graphic and textual part
of the stories told by authors and printers in book form,
thinking in terms of context, materiality, and significance.15
The two framing questions that organize this article are:
● how does understanding of a map or set of maps
change when considered within the context of books
and book history?
● how does understanding of a book or book genre
change when maps and the history of cartography
are included as elements for analysis?
For us, any map’s or text’s meaning is relative, contextua­
lized, unstable. As Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge observed
about maps (using a logic that equally applies to texts), a map
is “not unquestioningly a map (an objective, scientific repre­
sentation ([David] Robinson) or an ideologically laden

120 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS

representation ([J. B.] Harley), or an inscription that does work
in the world ([John] Pickles)” but rather “a set of points, lines
and colors that takes form as a map through mapping prac­
tices (an inscription from a conceptual point of view).” While
a mapmaker or book editor might intend a certain use or
interpretation, readers, using
[p]ractices based on learned knowledge and skills (re)make
the ink into a map […] every time they are engaged with [it]
—the set of points, lines and areas is recognized as a map; it
is interpreted, translated and made to do work in the work.
As such, maps are constantly in a state of becoming; con­
stantly being remade.16
The first decades of the twenty-first century present a fruitful
time to ask these questions. Digitization and online book collec­
tions, widespread since the mid-2010s, have provided an
impetus and resources to begin to catalogue maps in books
and have also hastened an end to a reader’s having to hold
a physical book in hand to lay eyes on or study any maps to be
able to work with them. It is now possible to find online a high-
resolution, color, digital version of almost any Western book
printed before 1923, which has prompted research libraries to
catalogue select maps. Book readers may be more likely to
consult an original eighteenth-century book online, whether
on individual library websites or consolidators including
Archive.org and Google Books. Ironically, the isolated analysis
impulse remains strong, as digitization projects have also made
individual maps from books globally accessible as single items,
creating contemporary “sovereign map” contexts that continue
to challenge a holistic approach. One of the most popular
online map collections, DavidRumsey.com, has only recently
begun to digitize non-map pages in its holdings. As a result,
reading and reading-practices are in a moment of reinvention.
What better time to consider how reading maps and books
together places different cognitive demands on readers from
reading a map as a complete and isolated document, or reading
a book without addressing how visual geographic materials
shape the activity and comprehension of the reader.
The article first considers four categories of analysis in
which we might consider the relationship between maps,
texts, and other elements in bound works, focusing principally
on books. Journals and magazines frequently include maps as
well. For the reader, encountering such maps may initially call
on contextualizing reading-practices similar to those described
below. However, print media such as newspapers and maga­
zines present distinct characteristics from books, namely an
ephemeral life that predisposes one to more agile and less
analytical reading. Journals share with books a production
process of months or years, and may share shelf space for
study and critical analysis. Yet journals hew to a preordained
format and style chosen by editors and publishers which limit
opportunity for authorial intervention and originality, and are
less likely to reclaim attention with revised and updated edi­
tions. So, while lines of analysis presented here might
profitably be applied to consider the role of maps in journals
and magazines, confirming similarities and differences
demands a separate study focused on each form of bound
material.
In the following section we propose techniques for profit­
ably considering (reading/analyzing) maps in material and
digital contexts as illustrations, part of an argument, or analy­
sis. By way of conclusion, we consider the implications of
analyzing maps in context, and an appendix with initial guid­
ing questions.
II. Maps in context: four categories of analysis
When scholars focus on maps in context, and in particular as
book elements, a popular approach is to consider maps within
a single work, such as Alida Metcalfe’s study of the maps accom­
panying Hans Staden’s mid-sixteenth-century account of captiv­
ity among the Tupinambá of Brazil. In an excellent analysis, the
author explores Staden’s possible contributions to the images,
their role within the particular book, his collaboration with
a humanist scholar experienced in book writing and image pub­
lication, and cartographic influences on the book’s cartography.17
A deep knowledge of the content and context of the book sup­
ports a thoughtful reading of the maps and their place in it. Yet
what often happens with such case studies is that the authors
make presumptions based on their own particular reading prac­
tices about what is “standard” in the book genre or in book-
making. In this case, the author argues that it was unusual for an
author such as Staden to contribute to map content, when such
intervention was common in manuscript as well as print accounts
of the period.18 A lack of comparative case studies limits authors’
ability to situate fully an excellent case study with secondary
sources to substantiate an analysis completely.
To examine the multiple relationships between maps and
books which affect meanings, aesthetic choices, and even
market value, we suggest four general frameworks for consid­
ering maps and books together. There are books with maps,
books about maps, books of maps, and books without maps.
To approach “books with maps,” a useful way to think
about how maps work within books is to consider book
genre. Certain book genres invite readers to think spatially
about content, and often include maps tailored to it, aesthetic
appreciation, scientific critique, evaluation of evidence, to
guide or direct actions in “real life,” and/or to fix a market
price for book or map collectors.19 For example, bibles tend to
include maps of Palestine; in the sixteenth century, the terri­
tory was the backdrop for maps of historical territories attrib­
uted to the twelve tribes of Israel, the Exodus route from
Egypt, and major pilgrimage sites. Guidebooks often include
a country or region map, with plans of city centers, museum
floors, or hiking trails, depending on their focus. Action adven­
ture and fantasy stories, from Daniel Defoe’s satire for adults,
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Arthur Ransome’s stories for chil­
dren, Swallows and Amazons (first published 1930), often include
WORD & IMAGE 121
a map of a hero’s journey or the fictional world. Since maps
began to appear in them, books of history and geography tend
to use maps to situate historical events or important sites, or
(as we discuss below) to illustrate a central narrative. Although
such maps may seem to be “off the shelf,” especially when they
are prepared by major mapmaking workshops or companies,
careful examination of their form and content belies this
assumption. Correspondence between publisher and author
reveals substantial authorial interest in map subjects, number,
and format.
Scholarship focused on book genre has produced evocative,
if episodic, work on literature, travel, bibles, educational texts,
geographies, and substantial studies of atlases.20 This approach
parallels scholarship about maps as elements in other kinds of
document, such as US and Brazilian news reporting.21
Caroline Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram’s study
of maps in sixteenth-century bibles offers an exemplary
approach in which the authors look in multiple editions of
bibles to find maps published in German, English, and Dutch,
but at first not in French or in Paris, and thus identify the
mapping as a Reformation project. They find five maps—in
order of first appearance: the Exodus of the children of Israel
(1525), Calvin’s map of Eden (1560), the division of Canaan
(1559), the Holy Land in the time of Christ, and the Eastern
Mediterranean (1549), which constituted the principal corpus.
Further, maps largely were included in bibles with both Old
and New Testaments, suggesting “new attitudes towards scrip­
ture and its ancient geographical setting.”22 Taking a book
genre, rather than a case study based on a mapmaker, a place,
or an event, allows Delano-Smith and Ingram to seek insight
into not just the maps self-referentially, but the larger conver­
sation their presence and content evoke. Asking how they
work and where they are located leads to a discussion of the
non-interchangeability of maps and “pictures” and reading
practices. Asking “why maps?” has an author conceptualize
maps as part of the publisher’s “mechanism for appropriating
the (sacred) world by categorizing it in the manner approved
by the religious authorities […] to ensure conformity in reli­
gious understanding.”23 It is a suggestive case study. One can
imagine a distinct set of questions and findings in a study
adding a comparative factor across space or time, holding
the genre category steady.24 For example, scientific books
induce readers to believe in maps as an uncontestable factual
representation. In contrast, satirical maps in journals and
books “play” with readers to criticize politicians, people, gov­
ernments, and ideas, emphasizing the aesthetics of the map as
an image (even when it acts as a political discourse).25 In this
sense, genres contribute to creating map meanings during the
reading process as they establish a framework that may pro­
pose and prevent certain readings.
An important subset of “books with maps” falls into the
category of “books about maps.” Early examples took to the
written word to describe the content or making of maps
122 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
published elsewhere, as Peter Apian’s Isagoge (c.1521) describing
the world map included in Pomponius Mela’s De Orbis (1522),
or independently, as James Rennell’s Memoir of a Map of
Hindoostan (1783).26 Today, books about maps tend to collect
maps from different eras and map genres to introduce
a broader public attracted to maps and mapping to course
books such as Mapping Latin America (2011), Mapping Japan
(2016), The Oxford Map Companion (2013),27 and an ever-expand­
ing constellation of popular or crossover scholarly books for
map enthusiasts, including To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps that
Changed the World (2012) and A History of America in 100 Maps
(2019),28 Kleiner Atlas Amerikanischer Überempfindlichkeiten,29 and
The Phantom Atlas (2016).30 Equally, many scholarly books in
the history of cartography can be considered books about map
construction, circulation, or consumption, whether through
case studies digging into the story of a map, such as the 1524
depiction of Tenochtitlán or the nineteenth-century geological
map “that changed the world”; through map technology,
genre, or element (e.g. The World Map, 1300–1492; Sea
Monsters: the Lore and Legacy of Olaus Magnus’s Marine Map); or
through mapmaker or region (Claes Jansz. Visscher: A Hundred
Maps Described; Medieval Islamic Maps; Made in Algeria: Généalogie
d’un territoire).31 Catalogues of map exhibits, such as those of the
British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France, offer
collections-based themes, tending to focus on form (marine
charts), theme (propaganda), or place (Paris) rather than mate­
rial context.32 As discussed in the next section, much of this
scholarship considers maps, often divorced from their original
context.
In contrast to books with maps are “books made up of maps”.
This group is rarer than might be expected. Sixteenth-century
manuscript books of portolan charts are an early, and rare,
example of books comprised only of maps. The sixty-odd sur­
viving copies from the workshop of Battista Agnese brought
books of illuminated sea charts into the hands of wealthy
patrons. The volumes, whether the presentation copy for
Spanish rulers at the John Carter Brown (JCB) Library or
a seven-map copy at the University of Pennsylvania, bind
together a selection of regional and world maps with no text
beyond the neatline.33 English translation and recompilation of
a Spanish derrotero, or waggoner, a hundred years later, repeats
the model, showing coastal views and profiles of South America
with no separate blocks of text. Today, the volume is often
referred to as “a buccaneer’s atlas”; its compiler dubbed it “a
description of the south sea.”34
Many presume that an “atlas” is a synonym of a “book of
maps,” with Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570)
taken as the first modern example of the form and Gerard
Mercator’s Atlas sive cosmographie (1606) the first to take the title.
Yet Ortelius’s “theater of the earthly world” is a textbook
example of a book in which visual elements, in this case
maps, and texts occupy equal physical space.35 Both works,
and many that followed, are technically books with maps. In
fact, their popularity led to widespread adoption of the term
“atlas” to name books—whether of maps or other collections
of documents, such as photographs—which claimed to show
a thorough or complete view of a subject through a whole and
its parts.36 Since Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator,
geographical atlases and their offspring, historical atlases,
might be books with maps (in which a description of a place
in words precedes or follows a map, either case by case, or in
two different book sections) as well as books of maps (compila­
tions of map sheets, with no additional texts). Whether con­
sidering a Renaissance example such as Ptolemy’s Geographia37
or Rebecca Solnit’s twenty-first-century urban atlases telling
the stories of San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York, text
and image work together; the work would be incomplete if
showing or telling was missing.38
By distinguishing “books with maps” and “books of maps,”
we can more usefully evaluate and compare purely pictorial
works that skipped explanatory texts. These include seven­
teenth- and eighteenth-century “viewbooks” such as Tassin’s
Les Plans et profils de tovtes les principales villes et lievx considérables de
France (1636) and DeBry’s Grands Voyages (1590–), which treated
maps and panoramas (Tassin) and maps and illustrations
(DeBry) without invoking the term “atlas.” Similarly, we no
longer have to consider together such disparate materials as
late eighteenth-century “atlases” comprising a volume of plates
(often including but not limited to maps) to accompany multi-
volume high-end books and nineteenth- and twentieth-century
geography books for school children. In the former case, an
author or publisher relied on the reading public or book-
buyer’s association of the term “atlas” with the concept of
“book of maps” as a shorthand to signal a book of “illustra­
tions.” In the latter, publishers also used the title “atlas,”
despite producing a “book with maps” that reduced maps’
significance and “sovereignty” by increasing the amount of
text and adding new visual elements, including photographs
or engravings of people, places, products and industries, and
statistical tables.
Finally, it is useful to think about which books are “map­
less”, and the reasons for the absence of cartographic material.
Some books which, due to their subject-matter, might be
expected to include maps, are born mapless for a variety of
reasons. Sometimes author or editor determines that readers’
engagement with spatiality or movement through space is not
required, or too expensive. In the former case, place and time
of publication mattered, as well as book content. For example,
in France, heavily illustrated and mapped volumes reached,
from the sixteenth century, international and moneyed buyers;
North and South American publishers rarely and sparingly
included maps before the mid-nineteenth century for more
limited, less wealthy markets.39 In the latter case, in a book
without maps, the text might recommend that readers consult
specific maps or map genres elsewhere in order to follow the
text, as when Elizabeth Craven invited her original
correspondent to follow the unusual route her coach took
across late eighteenth-century France by locating towns
along the way on a post-road map.40 A majority of books
probably falls into these two kinds of books without maps,
underlining by their absence the intentionality and importance
of maps within those books that actively seek to include them.
Other books have maplessness thrust upon them. Over
the life of a physical book, its maps—particularly foldout
maps—might be removed for preservation purposes in
a library collection or for sale on the print market (as
mentioned above), or left unopened during a digitization
project, effectively (if not physically) removing maps from
a reader’s experience. Over multiple editions, a book for
which maps were fundamental, such as Alexander von
Humboldt’s expensive folio multi-volume travels, might be
reduced to an inexpensive single volume paperback edition
that not only omits the original images, but leaves readers
no indication that they ever existed.41 These map removals,
whether by users or publishers, demand that readers inter­
ested in the content or history of a given work, be it map,
book, or their combination, be attuned to not only a single
copy in their hand but also other copies of the same edition,
or earlier and later editions. For readers, then, the materi­
ality of a work is inextricably linked to its effect on modes of
reading, looking at, and interpreting the whole as well as
constituent parts.
III. Material matters
In this section we provide an overview of maps as material
elements of books and consider how maps as material images
influence the act of reading, with particular attention to how
the reading experience differs for a standalone map relative to
maps in a book.
We find that reading map and text in a single, material
work requires the use of two distinct reading strategies. Text
tells a story; a map both shows and tells.42 Telling is
a sequential process. Each section of text, such as
a paragraph or a chapter, provides a reader with a clear
starting and ending point. There is no corresponding singular
entry point to a standalone map; the showing happens before
the telling. What draws one person’s eyes at first glance may
be the last thing another one sees. A reader’s engagement with
text and cartographic image together may disrupt both strate­
gies. A reader may be directed to follow textual instructions to
seek out a particular map element—such as a town, a route, or
a boundary—, inserting a specific graphic element into the
narrative. Alternatively, the reader might ignore instructions,
skipping entirely over a map to follow a narrative. In the first
instance, the reader disengages and re-engages with text,
“inserting” the map; in the second, the reader effectively fails
to see, let alone read, a map. Material choices, from size to
location to orientation, contribute substantially to the reader’s
experience.
WORD & IMAGE 123
 Book producers have placed maps in all book sections, from
the front cover to the endpapers. Placement often influences
both map content and how and when readers access the maps.
Maps at the front of a book, whether on a title page, frontis­
piece, or opposite the beginning of the first chapter, set the
stage by offering a graphic snapshot of the content within
(figure 4). In the Early Modern period, such a map might
supplement or replace an allegorical frontispiece (or be an
element in such an image), adding to the book’s attractiveness.
From the nineteenth century, overview and additional maps
could often be found at the rear of a book, tipped in or in
pockets glued to the cover, as changing print and paper
technologies led publishers to print maps on finer and larger
paper. Frontispiece maps have been a constant book element
since the seventeenth century; some even hopped across the
binding onto book and section title-pages (figure 5). When
technology allowed publishers to replace handmade marbled
endpapers with printed ones, graphic designers often used
these liminal spaces to show their cartographic skill and crea­
tivity in maps combining faithful territorial outlines with a
personalized element such as an itinerary, illustrations, or
historical or thematic map stylings in fiction and non-fiction
works (figure 6).
By far the most common place for a map in a book over the
centuries has been within the volume, either as an inset map
printed on up to a full or double page (made possible by
woodcuts and lithographs which could be inserted in a type
press, figures 14 and 8), or as a fold-out map inserted between
the printed pages (as with copperplate and stone engravings)
(figure 7).43 Interior maps tend to connect to a specific element
or section within a work, such as showing a series of sites
visited on a journey, changing political boundaries, or
a country and its provinces. They range from small to large
scale, may be numerous or few, unified, or distinct in style or
scale, and intended to be read independently or in sequence.
The city plans in the Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, the regional maps
in copies of Ptolemy’s Geographia, and transportation, street,
and museum plans in a nineteenth-century Paris guidebook,
offer different examples.
Placement in proximity to, or separate from, text influences
when and how a map or series of maps is approached by
readers. Locating overview maps in front sought reader atten­
tion before engagement with book content; readers needed to
find and seek out maps at the rear to access them before
finishing a book; location within chapters implicitly or expli­
citly linked maps to proximate content, whether a point in an

Figure 4. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, 1st edn (London: Cassell & Co., 1883). The placement of the map whose creation inspired the story signals
its significance to the plot, and the “handwritten” annotations on a traditionally signed nautical chart indicate the intent for readers to take the map as an
artefact of the world imagined in the text. Dallas, The Ruth and Lyle M. Sellers Collection on Deposit at Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University,
https://www.smu.edu/-/media/Site/Bridwell/Exhibitions/Sellers/BRA0833_1200.jpg?la=en (see also https://archive.org/details/islandtreasure00stev
rich/page/n8/mode/2up).

124 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS

Figure 5. Adolf Stieler, Hand-Atlas über alle Theile der Erde … (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1854), with a Gotha city plan on an interior title page. Rather than
connecting to the atlas material of celestial and geographic map plates, the plan drew readers’ attention to the mapmakers. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, RAR
KA 53 (see also https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-71241).

Figure 6. “Map to illustrate … ” in Edward J. Millward, The Copper Bottle (London: George Newnes, [1931]). This endpaper map includes a road map with
an inset labeled “Plan of the House,” cartouche with illustration, scale, neatline, and directional compass. Image from The Passing Tramp, “Forgotten
Books by Forgotten Authors,” January 19, 2012, http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/01/forgotten-books-by-forgotten-authors.html.

argument or other visual elements, such as additional maps, front or rear, once found, were also easy to locate physically,
charts, and plans, landscape or ethnographic photographs, facilitating a return to the same map if its information related
and scientific illustrations and diagrams. Maps located at the to multiple book sections. At the same time, once a map is no

WORD & IMAGE 125

Figure 7. J. Arrowsmith, “Map … ” in Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1825), vol. 1: fold-out map opposite p. 1.
The legend for geological information in the upper left-hand corner is meant to be colored; in this copy, no color is added, preventing the map from fulfilling
part of its informational duty. Courtesy: David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Figures 8-9. Samuel G. Goodrich, A Pictorial History of the United States With Notices of Other Portions of America Both North and South (Philadelphia: Butler & Co.,
1882), https://archive.org/details/pictorialhistory1882good. Most of the woodcut maps in this (octavo) popular history are scaled to fit vertically on the page
(figure 8, pages 88 and 89 at left). The map of the continental United States is rotated on a single page, rather than split across the binding or created as
a foldout map, a less expensive and easier proposition for the publisher that complicates the reader’s task (figure 9, pages 94 and 95 at right).

longer in proximity to related text, it risks physical or cognitive
disconnection from the book and its argument. Further, in
a standalone map, text and image are generally oriented to
facilitate simultaneous reading. However, a bound map’s
alignment is generally subservient to book structure and facil­
itates reading text on maps with adjacent text and images,
without requiring the rotation of a physical book in order to
engage with the map, or vice versa.
Form also shapes how readers encounter and engage in map
reading in the shared pages of a volume. Since the fifteenth
century, maps in books come in many shapes and sizes, from
foldout sheets that are printed separately on pages larger than
those in a volume, to woodcuts or prints that share a page with
narrative text. Most smaller maps are located for simultaneous
reading on the same page as relevant passages in the book,
requiring the ideal reader imagined by the author to move only

126 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS

the eyes and facilitating repeated consultations as the reader
could connect an idea in the text with the graphic elements of
the map. In such cases, a reader might place a finger on a town or
a border, consult the text, and then be able to review the same
place on the map with additional information. Reading larger
maps is more likely to require a reader to make a physical effort to
unfold or turn a page to see it, or to rotate the book to ensure the
text is horizontal. In such instances, larger type may facilitate
map-reading. Additionally, the act of unfolding a map supposes
an observation moment. The reader suddenly changes the scale
of observation: a large image expands the horizon of the book.44
However, when text and map are separated by a page turn, the
reader becomes disconnected from the original text, losing the
ability to compare, contrast, and connect easily with the broader
argument. This disorientation is particularly true for labeled/
indexed maps and plans, which provide textual information
keyed to the map outside of the frame.
Maps in books tend to be oriented to facilitate reading the
text on maps and other parts of the page together—if not
simultaneously, then at least without needing physically to
rotate the book to engage with the map, or vice versa. This
alignment is particularly important if text about the map exists
beyond the borders of the map, as when a legend to elements
identified by letters or numbers in the map is located below it
or on an opposite page. However, sometimes a map, as is
often the case with a perpendicular territory map such as one
showing a river or a route, is bound horizontally, requiring
readers to rotate the book to read the map as the mapmaker
intended (figures 8 and 9). In other words, content dictates
form and, on occasion, orientation.
As known to anyone who has been reprimanded by
a librarian for opening a folded map too quickly, or for
stretching a map or binding to achieve a flatness not permitted
by the book cradle, material obstacles to accessing some maps
in books may hinder access to information. Folds and tears are
one difficulty. Keeping a folded map open can make reading
text a challenge; in some cases, the map covers the text that
refers to it, forcing the reader to move back and forth to use it
fully as an author might intend. Relevant text—including
tables referring to lettered or numbered points on the map—
may run across multiple pages. The inability to make a map
flat in order to see the whole at once can be problematic.
Flat (or flattened) maps can be hung perpendicularly and
placed behind nonreflecting glass to reduce the risk of damage
as a face approaches. Might such inconveniences justify
a library’s removing a map from its original binding, and
providing it to a modern reader as a flat, unfolded map on
the side? Unless the purpose of reading is precisely to under­
stand how the original author and publisher wanted the reader
to experience reading the map in the book, what is the
disadvantage to such a decision? The point might be moot.
Today’s reader can often simulate a flat map experience when
reading a digital book. Manipulating virtual pages, while it
complicates understanding how big either map or book felt in
the flesh, can facilitate reading maps, not only by flattening
but also by allowing zooming.
Editorial practice also shapes maps’ role in books. Early
Modern printer-publishers including Mercator and Ortelius,
Pieter van der Aa (Netherlands), and Jean-Baptiste
Bourgignon D’Anville (France) developed signature map
styles that appeared in their own books of maps as well as
in maps for other texts. Post-Industrial Revolution mapmak­
ing firms, including Stanford’s (London), Bartholomew
(Edinburgh), Rand McNally (Chicago), and Perthes (Gotha,
Germany), put dozens of draftsmen to work and continued to
produce maps recognized for uniformity in scale and style,
whether for scientific journals or their own or clients’ atlases,
guidebooks, timetables, and other works. A regular reader
tends to see one copy and edition of a book, and to be largely
unaware of how content might have changed between edi­
tions and without being privy to what shaped editorial
choices. As a result, each reader’s understanding of content
depends on editors’ choices (directly or indirectly, subtly or
blatantly, consciously or unconsciously).45 Sometimes those
choices work their way into popular knowledge, as when
Mark Twain’s Huck Finn describes his expectation that the
territories below his hot air balloon will be pink and green;
Tom Sawyer mocks Huck’s confusion of map colors with
real-world colors. Neither author nor characters specify
which map publisher used pale pink and green shades—but
American road atlas readers no doubt would have seen Rand
McNally’s maps in their minds’ eye.46 In other cases, choices
about how to label or title an image also shapes readers’
responses. An analogical case is the artist Jasper John’s paint­
ing Map, which instructs viewers to see geography; had he
titled his work “Primary Colors” would most people see the
United States outline?
The editorial process to prepare a map for publication
usually involves several actors, and sometimes the end of
the “chain” or workflow is not reached. An incomplete edi­
torial process can interfere with a reader’s access to the
work’s intent or reduce a map’s function and make it com­
pletely useless or incomprehensible. For example,
a geological map on which references are not colored does
not provide complete information about the physical world
(figure 6). A mistake can be equally problematic. The first US
edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit47 misplaced the treas­
ure map of the Lonely Mountain, which is consulted by the
characters in the first chapter with a note to readers to do the
same. The table of contents reflected the intended location, on
the front endpapers; the map itself was on the rear endpaper.
A reader would thus not see the map on first opening the book,
and would have difficulty finding it despite the author’s and
book’s instructions.
The digital era introduces new challenges for considering
maps within books, whether via digitization of physical
WORD & IMAGE 127
publications or the development of “digital books” that follow
distinct principles of display and engagement. (In this article
we deal only with the former.) Until a decade into the twenty-
first century, a reader or owner had to hold a book in hand in
order to know what was in it. As we are now in 2021, hindsight
suggests that access was an important reason for the failure to
consider the collection holistically. For many rare books, being
housed in private and research libraries not only restricted
who might see what was inside but also limited the number
of items consulted to what could be consulted in real time and
to the ability to create and transport for home use reproduc­
tions of the original material object. Today, a scholar seated in
Iowa can consult the full text of incunabulae, codices, and
presentation copies of rare books, in color, page by page, from
Chile to Sweden, while a cataloguer can compare six copies of
a seventeenth-century geography book for information to con­
firm (or not) the location and content of any plates within.
Two scholars based in different time zones can collaborate
across space and time and share a four-handed essay in real
time and also the sources that inspire them. Ironically, the
dematerialization—or, better, the rematerialization—of books
and the careful digital reconstruction of them—now often with
covers and endpapers—reveals just how pervasive maps in
books are, and also how understanding of books and maps
will benefit from a holistic approach.
IV. Text and image: reading maps and books
together
While scholarship has not yet offered an integrated consid­
eration of maps, images, and books, recent research has
explored the links between words and images in specific
objects in both the arts and the sciences. Almost all studies
share an initial analysis: the relationship between visuality
and writing, word and image, reading and observing “pre­
sents itself as a problematic and paradoxical zone, like
a dark hallway separates words and images by the
shoulder.”48 In other words: the relationship between
image and text offers tools for consideration of maps as
constitutive and hybrid parts of books.
The significance of image–text as a relationship has been
front and center in recent years in various media: the plastic
arts, music, the history of the book, and even the history of
writing. This relationship has successfully displaced the “con­
tent” and “structure” paradigm of linguistic studies to recover
“the importance of the prise visuelle implied by writing; images
needing to be read as much as seen.”49 These approaches
“celebrate the ‘dance,’” as John Dixon Hunt has elegantly
described it, between word and image, a dance which disrupts
neat categories and opens up spiraling correspondences—
including consideration of text as part of a graphic display
understood through interactions of sign type, reference, and
figuration,50 and incorporation of any range of visual materi­
als, from the representational (photographs) to the abstract
128 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
(diagrams).51 This approach is different from that of studies
that consider the “map-as-text,” or, as Eileen Reeves argued,
a text that in the Renaissance users had to learn to read as an
image or form of plastic art; she finds that the “association of
maps and writing […] was bound to break down and give way
to the more obvious correlation with visual arts, because when
we have all learned to read maps, they look like pictures.”52
Within this new way of thinking, there is another layer to
consider, namely the relationship between image and text
within a document. In fact, reading a map by itself and read­
ing it as part of a book produce a different engagement. When
looking at a sheet map, the main interest is the information on
the page. In contrast, when looking at maps as part of larger
works, such as books, placement matters, both in terms of
physical location and orientation and what the location com­
municates about the relationship between map and book
content.
We posit three principal modes in which publishers and
authors present maps to engage readers: as an illustration
(aesthetic representation of a concept), as a synthesis (descrip­
tion of an argument), or as a graphic version of an argument
(visualization of arguments). Brief examples distinguish these
forms. We then consider the implications of the relationship of
both map and book materiality for understanding and inter­
preting maps and the works that include them.
Maps as illustration
A map works as an illustration when its content adds little or
nothing to the content of a book, but rather serves to increase
aesthetic appreciation and possibly monetary value. Such
a map might be a perfectly traditional geographic visualiza­
tion, as is the case for the maps accompanying the second
edition of Thomas Gage’s A New Survey of the West-India’s (1655).
Building on the first image-free edition, the author “enlarged”
the work and either author or publisher “beautified [it] with
maps” (as announced on the title page, opposite one of the
maps) to show readers the territories covered by the author in
his travels (figure 10).
In other cases, the geographic information may be of sec­
ondary importance, as with the world map decorating the title
page of Peter Apian’s Isagoge (Introduction) (c.1522) to illustrate
the concept of the book, a commentary on his 1520 world map
(figure 11 and figure 12). A quick glance shows “the world”
with three continents, south at the top, and (if the gaze lingers)
the four elements around the edges. The image illustrates the
concept, but is not expected to demonstrate or work in tandem
with it.
The movement of maps, whether within the pages of
a single book, across editions, or into new contexts, often
signals maps used as illustrations.How should librarians and
scholars put map and text in conversation when an owner
binds a new map in an old book, as happened with Emanuel
Figure 10. Thomas Gage, A New Survey of the West-India’s … The Second Edition … (London: printed by E. Cotes and sold by John Sweeting at the Angel in
Popes-Head-Alley, 1665). John Carter Brown (JCB) Library, https://archive.org/details/newsurveyofwesti03gage/page/n10/mode/2up.

Figure 11. Peter Apian, Isagoge in Typum Cosmographicum seu Mappam Mundi
(Impressum Landszhut: Per Ioannem Weyssenburger, c.1521), title page,
https://archive.org/details/isagogeintypumco00apia/page/n4/mode/2up.
Figure 12. Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber ([Landshutae, impensis
P. Apiani], 1524), pp. 52–3, “De Ventis,” https://archive.org/details/
Cosmographicusl00Apia/page/52/mode/2up. The same image, in this
case a woodcut globe, may appear as illustration in one part of a book
and as a map in another. The title page appearance of the map provides an
east–west orientation to illustrate or embellish the theme of cosmography.
Only when printed as part of a chapter does additional textual information

Bowen’s “An Accurate Map of the West Indies” (1740), tipped seventeenth-century map of France, “corrected” by members
into Thomas Gage’s English American (1677)?53 The territory in of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In its original moment,
the map is that traveled by the author, but is otherwise map consumers are invited to read, understand, and recognize
independent of the original. Consider equally a late both a corrected coastline and how this map as a standalone

WORD & IMAGE 129

Figure 13. “Carte de la France” in Jules Verne, Les Grands Navigateurs du XVIIIème siècle (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879), 8–9. Bibliothèque nationale de France,
département Littérature et art, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9625817d.
image claims French scientific prowess and political authority.
The same map, when inserted as an illustration and example
in the first chapter of Jules Verne’s history of travel two
hundred years later, loses specificity when merely identified
as an example of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French
contributions to cartography discussed in the text (figure 13).
The text does not mention the map, which appears without
caption or guiding text opposite a portrait of a French math­
ematician who was not born when the map was made. Based
on the map’s proximity to the discussion of French geographic
advances, it presumably is a model of the kind of work pro­
duced by the many makers—Cassini, Sanson, d’Anville, and
Buache, among others—whom Verne mentions.
Less frequent but perhaps more dramatic for readers are
maps that are unconnected to a book’s general argument.
These might disrupt the reading experience due to inconsis­
tencies, errors, or mistakes. One example is an anonymous
Jesuit instructional book (c.1750). This manuscript book pre­
sents a general introduction on geographical topics and pro­
poses a description of the world in the form of an atlas:
continent by continent, country by country. Where a reader
would expect to see the relevant region depicted in proximity
to text about it, the chapter “De l’Amérique” (On America)
shows instead a map of a coastal region on Europe’s North
130 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
Sea, Frisiae Pars.54 The rarity of such occasions underlines the
more general observation that authors, publishers, and readers
expect content, including and perhaps even particularly maps,
to have an easily identifiable connection to the project in
which they appear.
Maps as complement/synthesis
A second way to approach maps as part of texts is to focus on
how book text shapes readers’ interactions with maps as some­
thing to read or simply see. In many cases, the text can
function like a caption or epigraph that offers fundamental
information to guide the reader to recognize, interpret, or
understand the map. Returning to Apian’s world map, we
can understand it as a synthesis when it appears as the visua­
lization of Apian’s chapter “On the winds” in Cosmographicus
liber (1524). Here the map is shown opposite descriptive text
with the wind names set in type around the edge (figure 12).55
Seeing the map as the illustration of the idea of “the world
map” and reading it to know which directions specific winds
blow require the reader to engage with the map in the context
of each book.
Where the Apian world map provides the example of
a single map used distinctly in two different texts, a “book of
maps” offers a counterpoint. The book of islands, isolario, of
Benedetto Bordone (1528, 1534) places descriptive captions
below each map, a repetition which directs and facilitates the
reader’s movement between the two forms (figure 14).56 In this
example, the text adjusts to fit the available space between the
map plates. Many other isolarii dispensed with text altogether.
A frequent signal that a map is meant to complement or
supplement a textual argument is a direction to the reader to
consult a specific figure. Reading text is supposed to precede
and guide a reader’s engagement with a map, inserting it
conceptually, if not physically, in the argument.
Revisiting Verne’s volume, we can contrast the illustrating
historical map with a contemporary purpose-made map at the
end of the work that invites readers to use a key to identify for
themselves which parts of the world are considered “known”
(figure 15). The entire sea is marked as known, much African
and American interior space is “unknown,” raising the ques­
tion, unknown to whom? The historical map visualizes the
state of knowledge; the knowledge itself is irrelevant.
The second is a working document in which the reader uses
the map to supplement the information provided in the
narrative portion of the book. (The second map also offers
a solution to the material issue of a map splashed across two
pages: divided it in two, allowing for blank space in the center
so as to avoid losing details in the crack.)
In a printed book, the guidance is understood to come from
the author during the original creation of the work, as text and
commentary are created together. Interestingly, in
a manuscript, a comment might be added after the fact, either
by the author or a later reader, as in a copy of Juan Lopez de
Velasco’s manuscript Demarcación y división de las Indias (1575)
which twice connected text to map, noting: “as is represented
in the preceding universal map of the Indies” (figure 16) or “as
is represented in the universal map of the Indies which
follows.”57 The inscription directing the reader to the preced­
ing map appears to be written later, in darker ink and in the
same hand as the manuscript text, and is compressed due to
space constraints imposed by the subtitle immediately below.
The addition might provide insight into how the author,
transitioning from the act of creating the text to the act of
imagining a reading public, tries to ensure that a reader uses

Figure 14. Benedetto Bordone, Isolario di Benedetto Bordone, nel qual si ragiona di tutte l’isole del mondo... (Venice: Nicolò d’Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1534), Courtesy
of Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In Bordone’s isolario, island maps have very similar shapes. Yet the maps are the book’s focus, taking priority
for the mise en page, with texts occupying the space between the charts rather than maps fitting between the text. Denis Cosgrove, “Globalism and tolerance
in Early Modern Geography”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(4) (2003), 852–870.

WORD & IMAGE 131

Figure 15. “Monde connu et inconnu,” in Jules Verne, Les Grands Navigateurs du XVIIIème siècle (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879), 458-59, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/
12148/bpt6k9625817d/f475.item.
Figure 16: López de Velasco, Demarcación y división de las Indias (c.1575).
John Carter Brown (JCB) Library, Codex Sp 7 1-size, 2, f. 1, detail.
the map to understand better—perhaps more fully appre­
ciating spatial relationships—in the text. Understanding
this relationship requires a form of reading that is sensitive
to visible but implicit information, whether the document is
printed or manuscript, or the annotations are the author’s
or reader’s.
Maps as argument
The third mode of engagement, map as argument, requires the
reader to consider a map as a book’s organizing principle or
132 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
primary delivery of information. Take for example Abraham
Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). As in many atlases,
maps develop the full argument. That is, the work is built
around maps that make the author’s point. In this case,
a “theater of the world’s land,” or comprehensive or universal
picturing of the world, organized around the maps’ geographic
scale from most to least territory covered: the globe, continents,
and their component regions. In Ortelius’s atlas, the text
explains and supports the geographic visualizations presented
in maps, reinforcing the argument. The book’s organizing prin­
ciple of a world made up of continents is repeated in three ways:
the illustrated frontispiece (figure 17a), which anthropomor­
phizes them; the illustrative poem and index that follow,
which highlights continent names (figure 17b); and the world
map followed by the map plates showing the parts of the world,
from continents, to regional sheets (figure 17c). Each fully under­
stood continent—Europa, Asia, Africa, and America—appears
on the frontispiece as a woman, to whom the poem dedicates
a paragraph describing her mythology; “Magellanica,” repre­
senting an expected fifth continent, is shown only as a bust
Figure 17. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Antverpie: Apud Aegid. Coppenium Diesth,1570), frontispiece (a), illustrative poem (p. 2) (b), and
world map (c). All three formats reinforce the same argument: the world is organized into five parts or continents, whether through allegorical figures of the
continents (frontispiece), descriptions and mythical origins (poem), or (carto)graphic language (map). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.
gov/loc.gmd/g3200m.gct00126.

because its size and nature were as yet uncertain. Visually, the names and iconography, just as the bust lacks limbs.
bust communicates the same idea as the white space at the Interestingly, the text describing this unknown place is the last
bottom of the world map, where the unknown lacks place and shortest of the poem.

WORD & IMAGE 133

 Maps do not have to fill the book to provide an organizing
principle. Novels such as Stevenson’s Treasure Island or
Tolkien’s The Hobbit, to name two examples, build the adven­
tures of their protagonists on, respectively, an imagined island
and a fully visualized world, Middle-Earth. The maps by the
authors are presented as artifacts of the novels’ worlds and are
described, as well as displayed, as the tales progress. As
Ricardo Padrón has shown, the maps “work in tandem with
the text they illustrate to trigger a critical reflection upon the
nature and value of certain kinds of knowledge.”58
Additionally, each map sets the action in motion and forms
an important plot point in treasure-hunting journeys.
Placement at the start of the book makes that important role
clear. In the original print editions, the reader is meant to
encounter the maps as frontispiece (figure 4) and front end­
papers, respectively, before turning to the texts. Tolkien also
directs readers, via a footnote, to look at the treasure map
when his characters first encounter it.59
When and how the maps are first discussed in each book are
equally revealing. In Treasure Island, the document is intro­
duced at the climax of the first section of the book, as it is
unsealed and explained to Jim Hawkins, the protagonist and
narrator. With map in hand, the young hero gains adult allies,
a destination and a goal. Access to the knowledge of the map’s
information about the location of the island and of its buried
treasure inspires the rest of the action. The Hobbit opens with
“an unexpected party” as the wizard Gandalf reveals a treas­
ure map and key to a hidden door in the Lonely Mountain
made by long-dead dwarf leader Thrór.60 His purpose is to
entice “burglar” and hobbit Bilbo Baggins and Thorin,
Thrór’s grandson, to retrieve the dwarves’ gold from the
dragon Smaug. The map may belong to Thorin, but for
Tolkien, the hobbit who is introduced from the start as one
who loved maps confirms his place as protagonist through his
map use. Baggins repeatedly consults, learns from, and guides
the group on the physical journey with the map and figures
out how to use the key. In The Hobbit, once the map is no
longer needed, the characters’ interior journey begins in the
book’s last act, as men, dwarves, elves, and their allies defeat
Smaug, battle each other and goblins, and make peace by
justly dividing the treasure. More than illustrations, the two
sketches of treasure-maps are founding and structural ele­
ments, physical and figurative, of two beloved adventure
books.
aps’ contributions to book arguments might seem to cor­
relate easily with material; this approach works well for
a first edition when authors or publishers put together
a complete project. Subsequently, maps might be extracted,
excerpted, and republished separately, losing their original
context; this is the fate of many “standalone” maps, as
noted above. Alternately, text, maps, or both elements in
later editions might, with no indication or commentary, be
presented differently from in the original package, or
134 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
include modifications based on new information or even
unproven beliefs. In such cases, any differences risked
passing unnoticed even as they might affect a reader’s
understanding of the argument.
Take, for example, changes to map and texts in two
sixteenth-century Italian geography books, each of which
went through several editions. Cartographer and editor
Girolamo Ruscelli’s 1561 Italian language edition of
Ptolemy’s Geographia was republished twice during the
author’s lifetime (1562, 1564), soon after his death in 1566
(1574), and again in 1598 and 1599. The planisphere world
map Orbis Descriptio was a distinguishing feature of the work
since its first edition; subtly, the 1598 and 1599 editions added
a large southern continent to it.61 Giuseppe Rosaccio’s Il
mondo e sue parti (1595) underwent more dramatic shifts during
the author’s lifetime. The text changed from descriptive
paragraphs (1595) to lists of place names correlated with the
maps (1597) (figures 18b and 19a). Even more unusually, the
1595 edition split several maps, including the map of Spain,
across two book openings, which not only makes it impossible
to read the full map “at one glance” but may confuse readers,
as the map no longer clearly belongs to the end or start of
a chapter (figures 19a and 19b).
For today’s scholar, the differences across editions of the work
make for an interesting research topic: who was responsible, how
did maps and texts work differently in the distinct formats, and
why? More intriguingly, how might we consider the differences
without leaving the sixteenth century? Comparative reading of
either text or maps at the time of publication would have been
unlikely, since few if any individuals would have simultaneous
access to multiple, or all, editions. So, a reader would have
assumed that Ruscelli did or did not believe in the existence of
the southern continent on the basis of the edition consulted.
Rosaccio’s readers, for their part, would have no reason to
question the format of the text and maps. Following up such
an insight by reexamining geographers’, philosophers’, and
historians’ interpretations of Ruscelli and Rosaccio to identify
any divergence in analysis would be an intriguing next step to
test this hypothesis. That is, considering Ruscelli’s map in multi­
ple editions of a book in which both map and textual content
change raises methodological questions distinct from content
questions such as why (or how) a continent is represented, or
not. The Rosaccio example similarly invites a methodology
focused on the impact of form as well as on content on
understanding.
Another example of map as argument is when the primary
purpose of a text is to set the stage for map reading or inter­
pretation. Such a text can prepare a reader for a physical or
mental interaction. School geography textbooks offer examples
of both kinds of activity. A common use of text is to advise
student readers how to draw a map or to list information, such
as place names or coordinates, to be drawn in relation to what is
seen on the page. In cases of geography manuals, the instruction
Figure 18. Giuseppe Rosaccio, Il mondo e sue parti (Florence: Appresso Francesco Tosi, 1595), 27–28. Museo Galileo, https://opac.museogalileo.it/imss/
resource?uri=000000971836&l=en. The 1595 edition of geographical descriptions of the parts of the world by Rosaccio alternates maps and texts. Unusually,
the map of the Iberian Peninsula (pp. 38–39) seems to be treated as a text, destroying the integrity of an image created as a unit, and challenging how we
“read” images.

Figure 19. Giuseppe Rosaccio, “Figura della Spagna,” 30–31, in Il mondo e sue parti (Verona: Per Francesco dalle Donne, & Scipione Vargnano dus genero,
1596), John Carter Brown Library, H596.R788m, In the 1596 edition, the 1595 edition’s map (exactly the same plate) appears as a double-page spread (pp.
30–31), allowing readers to take in the mapped territory at a glance, as is customary and expected.

suggests specific modes of reading and behavior associated in
the use of drawing and tends to be straightforward and short,
accompanied by an example of the image in question that
visualizes the lesson as either a finished map, a sketch map, or
both. A French geography book for students in the seventh
grade (5ème), offers an opposite lesson: how to read a map to
think geographically in text. Each double-page spread shows
a geographical map of a region (usually, continents and sub­
continents, but also some big countries). Beneath each map,
a didactic text accompanied by a simplified sketch appears
under the heading, “Regardons les cartes et retenons” (“Let’s
look at the map and recall [specific geographical details on the
map]”).62 For example, for “Le relief de l’Amérique anglosax­
onne” students should look at and memorize certain geogra­
phical features, such as topography, hydrography, and natural
resources, among others (figure 20). In effect, this short text
“suggests” how a student ought to read the map. The textual
section de-visualizes mapped information and offers
a verbalization of the map. Without mentioning it, the exercise
teaches a basic premise of cartography: all maps result from
a selection and ordering process by the maker that can be
reverse-engineered by the map user.

WORD & IMAGE 135

Figure 20 Atlas de 5é. Le monde polaire, l’Amérique, l’Asie, l’Océanie (autour du Pacifique ...), Cours de V[iktor] Prévot; R. Lucas, maps (Paris: Librairie E. Belin, 1971).
Cartographie R. Lucas. Cartographical images in schoolbooks encouraged students to learn geography by drawing or adding details to sketch maps. In this
book, every region was displayed in a double page. On the left, a map with physical and topographical information, sometimes accompanied by
a topographical profile, showed opposite a simplified outline for students to copy and, perhaps, fill in.

V. Conclusions and implications
In considering Western maps and books as inextricably con­
nected materially and analytically, we invite the reimagining of
curatorial and collection practices as well as academic research
agendas, whether the work is framed around production,
circulation or consumption.63 The frameworks and examples
laid out above suggest that reflection on maps in an original
context serves at least three purposes. First, considering and,
as necessary, reinserting a map into an original context may
provide a better understanding both of map and of book
content while potentially enriching or altering understanding
of readership, circulation and influence on culture and society.
Second, considering the original context permits and requires
a (re)evaluation of inferences about the effect—whether gen­
eral, exceptional, or marginal—of certain images of the world
usually inferred from maps analyzed in isolation. Third and
equally important, considering maps in books invites a reeva­
luation of readers and reading practices that may offer new
paths to understanding map consumption and interpretation
by contemporary audiences.64
In identifying and connecting materiality, social impact, and
image and text relations, we have shown that the materiality of
maps in books—which includes their number, location, orien­
tation, shape, size, and color—reflects constraints, traditions
and innovations connected to the place and time of publica­
tion, printing techniques and decisions taken by authors, edi­
tors, publishers, sellers, and even readers. For example, as
discussed above, the physical form and presence of maps in
books influence when and how readers encounter and connect
them with text and other book elements. Examples, including
a sixteenth-century geography, Ruscelli’s Orbis Descriptio, and
a twentieth-century novel, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, offer suggestive
paths to follow in rethinking non-fictional and fictional work.
Similarly, evaluating the social impact or importance that
maps had when they circulated –from knowing where and
how publishers and authors inserted or removed maps in
different books or editions—might change our understanding
of how many and what kind of people were likely to be
familiar with that image, where and when. Knowing how
a map was originally intended to contribute to a larger work
may lead to a reevaluation of what their authors tried to
communicate and what their readers were able to get from
them. This holistic approach is likely to be especially useful in
avoiding anachronistic analysis and conclusions based on
a twenty-first-century reader’s ability to do comparative work
because of familiarity with a seemingly limitless supply of
originals through access to multiple copies and editions in
both digital and physical form.
Finally, the discussions around the word and text relationship
illuminate the multiple and complex ways in which readers may
simultaneously read texts and images which are intentional and
constituent elements of the same object. By presuming and
arguing that the content conveyed by image or word is neither
replaceable nor translatable into the other form, this analysis

136 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS

points to the challenge that simultaneity poses to a fuller under­
standing of the conversations between texts and images.
In sum, we have shown how the relations of maps and texts
as material and digital objects shape understanding and inter­
pretation, as well as how reading practices also can reshape
the reading of both maps and books. The implications, we
hope, will reorient practices in curation, collection, and scho­
larship. For collections and collectors, ideally the conclusion
that map and text are bound together will solidify an emerging
consensus that privileges retaining maps in original source
material. If separation is deemed necessary, a permanent
‘paper trail’ will provide a bibliographic link to ensure that
future users can virtually, if not physically, associate the
parts. Equally, for collectors, curators, and bibliographers,
this approach should strengthen the commitment to making
maps and other “data visualizations” visible to readers, pri­
marily by cataloguing maps in bibliographic records. In an
ideal world, research into authorship, scale, and techniques of
production of visual images, including maps, would be
included. However, detailed bibliographical work requires mul­
tiple forms of expertise and is labor- and time-intensive. So, in
a practical world, if bibliographers could start by identifying
map titles and locations, drawing when possible on lists of
figures provided in tables of contents, the improvement would
directly and indirectly reshape research practices.
Finally, we hope that with this framework at hand and more
bibliographic tools available, more scholars include questions
about context when developing and executing projects about
the histories of maps and books, pamphlets, newspapers, and
other works that bind text and image. There are many lines of
investigation suggested here that could benefit from additional
case studies, particularly those that put different publishing
house or national bookmaking practices in conversation, and
theoretical work, including how reading practices contribute
to a text’s state of becoming. One approach would follow how
physical traces left by readers reveal reading and thinking
practices, and would be sensitive to when and where fingering,
underlining, highlighting, annotations, corrections, comments,
punctuation (from question marks and exclamation points),
along with other marks, offer a “dialogue” between reader, book,
and map. Another might explore descriptions of less visible and
situational practices. For example, map and reader may interact
distinctly in a library or study, in a classroom, and in the field. The
public’s engagement with text and image differs when read silently,
out loud, individually or collectively; in short, the act of reading
participates in creating meaning in many ways. Whatever ques­
tions are pursued, understandings of the history of maps and texts
will, assuredly, deepen and broaden.
NOTES
1– Elizabeth Eisenstein’s groundbreaking The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 [1997]) remains the
point of departure for studies of the relationship between printing and
engraving, text and illustration, including maps within quattrocento books.
We use “codex” to distinguish manuscript from printed books. For
a definition, see “codex, n.,” in OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, December 2019), https://www-oed-com.lib-proxy01.skidmore.edu/
view/Entry/35593?redirectedFrom=codex.
2– Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” in Maps. Finding Our
Place in the World, ed. James R. Akerman and Robert Karrow, Jr. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 255–87, at 265–67.
3– James R. Akerman, “The Structuring of Political Territory in Early
Printed Atlases,” Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 138–54, at 138.
4– The United States Library of Congress subject headings catalogue calls
up only real property maps when “maps, books” is the subject search
term, and none when the term is “cartography books.” In contrast, “book
illustration” identifies thirty-seven subject headings under “illustration” or
“illumination” of books. “Notice RAMEAU, ‘illustration des livres,’” BnF
Catalogue général—Bibliothèque nationale de France, last modified
September 14, 2019, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb119320913.
5– In the past, Spain’s Archivo General de Indias (Archive of the Indies)
physically removed all maps from the bound reports of its overseas agents,
leaving readers to follow instructions to consult the object catalogued in
a separate Mapas y Planos section. The extensive material and digitized
sheet map collection (Cartes et Plans) in France’s national library offers little
information about possible book provenance. As library separation of
maps from their original contexts has declined, individual print sellers
such as eBay have become aggressive disassemblers of books of all kinds.
Heavily illustrated popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions
seem to be a never-ending source for a market seeking prints of particular
territories to hang and frame, presumably because selling multiple indivi­
dual prints is more lucrative and popular than the book market.
6– J. B Harley, New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul
Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); see also Matthew
Edney, “Putting ‘Cartography’ into the History of Cartography: Arthur
H. Robinson, David Woodward, and the Creation of a Discipline,”
Cartographic Perspectives 51 (2005): 14–29, https://doi.org/10.14714/CP51.393,
https://cartographicperspectives.org/index.php/journal/issue/view/cp51.
Recently, Edney has refined his perspective; Matthew Edney, Cartography: The
Ideal and Its History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). For map use,
see especially Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America 1750–1860
(Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute and Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2017).
7– Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Barbara Stafford, Voyage into
Substance: Art, Sciences, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
8– Art-historical practice in some instances classes Early Modern illustra­
tions with substantial geographic components, including views, panora­
mas, and profiles, as “landscape” or “seascape” rather than cartography,
with substantial attention to how modes of seeing and depicting become
more realistic over time. The focus on perspectives suggests that the world
is coming into focus as technologies of distance viewing (such as telescopes)
and copying (camera obscura) are incorporated. This omission is widespread,
although with notable exceptions. Important works that curiously overlook
maps as images include: Roland Barthes, La torre Eiffel. Textos sobre la
imagen, trans. Enrique Folch González (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2001
[2002]); Hans Belting, Antropología de la imagen, trans. Gonzalo María
Vélez Espinosa (Buenos Aires: Katz, 2002 [2007]); Peter Burke, Visto y no
visto. El uso de la imagen como documento histórico, trans. Teófilo de Lozoya
(Madrid: Crítica, 2001 [2005]); and Manguel Alberto, Leyendo imágenes
(Buenos Aires: Norma, 2000). Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ambitious compilation
The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 1998) presents sixty articles
running the gamut of themes related to visual culture in contemporary
societies, with classic texts such as Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture?”
WORD & IMAGE 137
and Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image” to postmodern articles
such as Reina Lewis, “Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion
Imagery” and Ann McClintock, “Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity
Racism and Imperial Advertising.” Exceptions in addition to Eisenstein,
Printing Press, include Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), which effectively integrates
maps as elements of imperialism; and Anthony Grafton, with April
Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of
Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard
University Press, 1992).
9– While Eisenberg was attentive to maps in the history of printing,
landmark studies on the history of the book focus on images without
addressing maps. Notable works that mention maps (at most) only in
passing include: Svend Dahl, Bogens Historie (Copenhagen: Haase &
Sons, 1927), a classic that is still read and translated; and the more recent
David Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Jacques Lafaye, Albores de la imprenta. El libro en España y Portugal y sus
posesiones de ultramar (siglos XV y XVI) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 2002); David Finkelstein and Alistair McCreery, An
Introduction to Book History (New York: Routledge, 2012); and the multi-
volume A History of the Book in America, David D. Hall, General Editor, 3
vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007–14). Studies
that consider maps within literature tend to frame scholarship by literary
genre rather than by book history, hinting at, rather than fully developing,
an analysis of maps in the books to which they contribute. Several essays
in Andres Engberg-Pedersen, ed. Literature and Cartography: Theories, Histories,
Genres (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), suggest that the field is evolving
towards directly addressing maps as book elements.
10– Christian Jacob, L’Empire des cartes: Approche théorique de la cartographie à
travers l’histoire (Paris: Bibliothèque Albin Michel, 1992); trans. into English
by Tom Conley as The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography
throughout History, ed. Edward H. Dahl (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).
11– For themes, see “Past Nebenzahl Lectures,” Newberry Library,
https://www.newberry.org/past-nebenzahl-lectures (accessed January 15,
2019).
12– The History of Cartography Project, begun in 1987 under the leader­
ship of J. Brian Harley and David Woodward as a University of Chicago
Press publication, is an encyclopedic treatment of maps and mapping
practices. Its silence on the history of maps in books, notably the lack of
a chapter on atlases in the Renaissance volumes, is indicative of this
subject’s absence in research programs. The articles of vols 1–3 are avail­
able online; vols 4 and 5 will be published by 2020, https://geography.
wisc.edu/histcart/.
13– A few are already at work. Nicolas Verdier, La Carte avant les géographes.
L’avènement du régime cartographique en France au XVIIIe siècle (París:
Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015), especially the section entitled
“Mettre une carte dans un livre” (30–36), offers an initial categorization
of map placement and its impact on reading and readers based on
research primarily on French eighteenth-century work, with useful sup­
porting evidence from bookbinders’ manuals and publishers advertise­
ments that will serve those seeking comparison. We welcome indications
of other scholars also following this path.
14– Exemplary case studies include Alida Metcalfe, “Mapping the
Traveled Space: Hans Staden’s in Warhaftige Historia,” e-journal of
Portuguese History 7, no. 1 (2009): 1–15; and Elizabeth Ross, Picturing
Experience in the Early Printed Book: Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio from Venice to
Jerusalem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
See below for a discussion of maps and book genre.
15– From an initial discussion at the John Carter Brown (JCB) Library in
June 2012, we have been fortunate to have led two workshops on maps in
books as bound images: the first in January 2014, sponsored by
“Borderlabs” of the Duke University Franklin Humanities Institute, and
the second in January 2019, during a three-week residency at the JCB
138 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
Library. We also led a roundtable at the International Conference in the
History of Cartography in 2017. We thank Jim Akerman and Matthew
Edney for accompanying us on the journey from the outset. Partners in
conversation included Susan Danforth, Ricardo Padrón, Joost Depuydt,
and Stephanie Stillo. We offer warm thanks to JCB Director Neil Safir for
a joint fellowship that allowed us to complete research and the initial draft
of this article, and to the participants, including Akerman, Edney, and
Stillo, Ernesto Capello, Lena Denis, Dana Liebsohn, Bertie Mandleblatt,
Chet Van Duzer, and David Weimer, several of whom have contributed
online essays to “Bound Images,” JCB Library, https://jcblibrary.org/
bound-images (accessed December 20, 2019).
16– Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “Rethinking maps,” Progress in Human
Geography 31, no. 3 (2007): 331–34, at 335. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0309132507077082.
17– Metcalfe, “Mapping the Traveled Space.”
18– For an overview of such an approach, see Jordana Dym, “Travel
Writing and Cartography,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed.
Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2019), 423–41; and Jordana Dym, The World Displayed: Maps and Travelers
from Marco Polo to Amelia Earhart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
forthcoming).
19– The category of genre can be applied to maps when they can be
identified with a relatively stable type of statement, especially in thematic
content. This idea of cartographic genre is inspired specifically by Mikhail
Bakhtin, Estética de la creación verbal, trans. Tatiana Bubnova (Mexico City:
Siglo XXI, 1985). We recover his conceptual proposal that “a given
function (scientific, technical, journalistic, official, everyday) and certain
determined conditions, especially in the sphere of discursive communica­
tion, generate certain genres, that is thematic, compositional and stylistic
types of determined and relatively stable speech. The style is indelibly
linked to determined thematic units, and, most importantly, to determined
compositional units” (252). In this sense, “the discursive will of the speaker
is achieved above all in the choice of a determined discursive genre. The
choice is defined by the specificity of a given discursive sphere, by con­
siderations of the meaning of the object or themes, by the concrete
situation of the discursive communication, by the participation in the
communication, etc.” (267) (informal translation by the authors from the
Spanish edition). This is not a call to create a taxonomy permitting
classification in exhaustive form of all possible maps, but to provide
coherence to certain specific corpuses.
20– Starting points include Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds”; James
Akerman and Robert Karrow, eds,. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 255–87; John Amadeus
Wolter and Ronald E Grim, eds, Images of the World: The Atlas through
History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997); Catherine Delano-Smith, “Maps
as Art and Science: Maps in Sixteenth Century Bibles,” Imago Mundi 42
(1990): 65–83; and Dym, “Travel Writing and Cartography.”
21– Mark Monmonier considers maps’ “dual role as information and
decoration” in the delivery and packaging of the news; Mark
Monmonier, Maps with the News: The Development of American Journalistic
Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xi–xiv, at xi.
“Preface”; see also André Reyes Novaes, “Maps in Newspapers:
Approaches of Study and Practices in Portraying War since the 19th
Century,” in Brill Research Perspectives in Map History (Amsterdam: Brill,
2019), vol 1/1: 1–118.
22– Delano-Smith and Ingram, Maps in Bibles, xvi.
23– Delano-Smith, “Maps as Art and Science,” 78.
24– “Maps as Art and Science,” pp 65–83, at 78. Catherine Delano-Smith
and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500–1600: An Illustrated
Catalogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991); Delano-Smith, “Maps as Art
and Science.”
25– Roderick M. Barron, “Bringing the Map to Life: European Satirical
Maps 1845–1945. Cartes satiriques de l’Europe 1845–1945 ou comment
donner de la vie aux cartes,” BelGeo. Revue belge de géographie, nos. 3–4 (2008):
445–64; Gregory S. Baptista, “Politics, the Press, and Persuasive
Aesthetics: Shaping the Spanish Civil War in American Periodicals”
(Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2009); Carla Lois, « ¿Bromas
cartográficas? », Terra Brasilis (New Series) [Online], 11, 2019, posted
online 31 August 2019. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/terrabrasi
lis/3492; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/terrabrasilis.3492.
26– Peter Apian, Isagoge in Typum Cosmographicum seu Mappam Mundi
(Landshut: Johannes Weyssenburger, c.1521); Pomponius Mela, De Orbis
situ libri tres (Basel: Andreas Cratander, [1522]).
27– Academic projects include Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds, Mapping
Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011); Karen Wïgen, Sugimoto Fumiko, and Cary Karacas, Cartographic
Japan: A History in Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017);
Susan Schulten, A History of America in 100 Maps (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2018); and Patricia Seed, The Oxford Map Companion
(Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2013).
28– Jeremy Harwood, To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps that Changed the
World (New York: Chartwell, 2012).
29– Franz Reitinger, Kleiner Atlas amerikanischer Überempfindlichkeiten
(Klagenfurt: Ritter, 2008); Franz Reitinger, “Mapping relationships:
Allegory, gender and the cartographical image in eighteenth-century
France and England,” Imago Mundi 51.1 (1999):106–30, DOI: 10.1080/
03085699908592905
30– Edward Brooke-Hitching, The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and
Blunders on Maps (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
31– This selection is meant to be evocative, not comprehensive. Works
mentioned are by Barbara Mundy, Simon Winchester, Evelyn Edson,
Joseph Nigg, Tony Campbell, Karen C. Pinto, and Zahia Rahmani
with Jean-Yves Sarazin. Chet Van Duzer, Henricus Martellus’s World Map
at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence (Cham: Springer,
2019), offers an example of the strands entwined. Barbara Mundy, The
Mapping of New Spain: indigenous cartography and the maps of the Relaciones
Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) Simon
Winchester, The Map that Changed the World (London: Viking/Puffin,
2001) Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007) Joseph Nigg, Sea Monsters: the lore and legacy
of Olaus Magnus’s marine map (Lewes, UK: Ivy, 2013) Tony Campbell, Claes
Jansz. Visscher: a hundred maps described (London: Map Collectors’ Circle,
1968) Karen C. Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps: an exploration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017) Zahia Rahmani with Jean-Yves
Sarazin, Made in Algeria: généalogie d’un territoire (Marseille: MuCEM;
Vanves: Hazan, 2016).
32– For example, Peter Barber and Tom Harper, Magnificent Maps: Power,
Propaganda and Art (London: British Library, 2010); Tom Harper, Atlas:
A World of Maps from the British Library (London: British Library Publ.,
2019), Jean-Yves Sarazin, Rêves de capitale: Paris et ses plans d’embellissement
(Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2003); and Catherine Hofmann,
Hélène Richard, and Emmanuelle Vagnon, L’Âge d’or des cartes marines:
Quand l’Europe découvrait le monde (Paris: Seuil, Bibliothèque nationale de
France, 2014).
33– Battista Agnese, [Atlas of Portolan Charts] (Venice, 1543–45?). JCB
Library, Codex Z 3/2-SIZE.
34– British Library, Sloane MS 44, “Charles II of England: MS. was
dedicated to him by Capt. B. Sharp: in 1684; Bartholomew Sharp,
Captain: A Spanish book of original drawings of the South Seas, taken
by, out of a captured […].”
35– The idea of a “theater” was a Renaissance trope, from Giuglio
Camillo’s “theater of memory,” to a title of a book, museum, or library
inviting scientific consensus of the collection of elements within, whether
narratives, images, portraits, coins, plants, or other items. M. Giulio
Camillo, L’idea del theatro dell’eccellen (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550).
Giorgio Mangani, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio. Misticismo, geografua e
collezionismo nel Rinascimento dei Paesi Bassi (Modena: Franco Cosimo
Panini, 1998). By 1570, a half-dozen works published in French,
Spanish, Italian, and Latin had already claimed the stage-setting title
of theater, with three subsequent works taking a decidedly scientific turn:
Jacques Besson, [Theater of instruments and machines] (Lugduni
[Lyon]: Apud Barth. Vincentium [by Barthélemy Vincent], 1578).
Gynaeceum sive theatrum mulierum (Joost Amman [Frankfurt am Main:
Sigmund Feyerabend, 1586]), and Théâtre de la nature universelle (Jean
Bodin, Le théâtre de la nature universelle ou le tableau du monde [Lyon: Iean
PIllehote, 1597]). In cartography, the idea of a “theater” spread with the
editorial success of Ortelius’s book. The “theater” placed geography
before the eyes of the reader, and set the stage with a visible inventory
of geographic elements, including a portico in the frontispiece which, as
Denis Cosgrove showed, achieved an appreciation of architecture and
classical design, Denis Cosgrove, “Globalism and tolerance in Early
Modern Geography,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 93.4 (2003): 852–70.; Carla Lois, “¿Cuándo la geografía
perdió su ‘graphia’? Un ensayo histórico y crítico sobre las habilidades
gráficas promovidas en la geografía escolar,” GEOgraphia 19, no. 40
(2017): 56–74, at 59. For instance, the historians of science Lorraine
Daston and Peter Galison analyze the epistemic ideal of objectivity
using as a main corpus what they call “scientific atlases...purveying
images of everything from spectra to embryos.” Lorraine Daston and
Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, No. 40,
Special Issue: Seeing Science (Autumn, 1992), pp. 81–128, at p. 81.
36– Teresa Castro, “Atlas: Pour une histoire des images ‘au travail,’”
Perspective actualité en histoire de l’art 1 (2013): 161–67, http://perspective.
revues.org/1964 (accessed July 1, 2020).
37– Geoffrey Roper, “The Muslim World,” in The Book: A Global History,
ed. Michael F. Suarez, S. J. Woudhuysen, and H. R. Woudhuysen
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 524–52, which highlights Al-
Idrisi’s twelfth-century Book of Curiosities of the Sciences, and Marvels for the
Eyes; Phillip Allen, The Atlas of Atlases: The Map Maker’s Vision of the World
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1993). Since Ptolemy’s Geographia reached Europe as
a text with instructions on how to make maps, rather than as a document
with maps, this pedigree might benefit from some review.
38– Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010); Rebecca Solnit, with Rebecca
Snedeker, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2013); Rebecca Solnit with Joshua Jelly-Shapiro,
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2016).
39– Lack of map engraving expertise and a popular (low-cost) market were
no doubt factors including maps in Anglo-American publications. In
Spanish America, maps occasionally appeared in city directories (guías
de forasteros) and newspapers, including an 1800 engraved road planning
map in the Gazeta de Guatemala—suggest, in contrast, a lack of market.
Research is needed for both regions. For initial thinking about the context
of the North American literary market in an essay whose focus on the map
as object stops short of fully exploring how maps’ materiality is integral to
books, and vice versa, see Martin Brückner, “The Cartographic Turn and
American Literary Studies: Of Maps, Mappings, and the Limits of
Metaphor,” in Turns of Event: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies in
Motion, ed. Hester Blum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2016), 40–60.
40– Elizabeth Craven, A Journey Through Crimea to Constantinople (London:
printed for G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 1789), 25.
41– Cf., for example, Alexander von Humboldt, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales
du nouveau continent, fait dans les années 1799 à 1804, 30 vols (Paris: F. Schoell,
1805–34), with Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of A Journey to the
Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, trans. Jason Wilson (London: Penguin,
1995). For a twentieth-century Brazilian example of the loss of map and text
relationships after an author no longer shapes publication, see Clara
Rowland, “Material Cartography: João Guimarães Rosa’s Paratexts,” in
Literature and Cartography, Theories, Histories, Genres, ed. Anders Engberg-
Pedersen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 391–410.
WORD & IMAGE 139
42– Maps work as images and are understood as such because readers/
observers/viewers apply a set of graphic conventions implied in their
respective visual culture (which are not exclusively cartographic) to figure
out what a map represents. For instance: the bigger the symbol used, the
bigger the phenomenon represented; the more intense the color, the more
intense the subject mapped. In addition, maps work as texts, which can
(but do not always) include titles, legends, explanatory notes, as well as
textual and numeric denomination of map features, such as place names
and distances and heights.
43– In general, maps printed separately are not on numbered pages, but
numbered as separate plates, as shown in figures 1–3; for example, Carla
Lois, “Las evidencias, lo evidente y lo visible: el uso de dispositivos visuales
en la argumentación diplomática argentina sobre la Cordillera de los
Andes como frontera natural,” Treballs de la Societat Catalana de Geografia,
no. 70 (2010): 7–29.
44– Peter Haining, Movable Books: An Illustrated History; Pages & Pictures of
Folding, Revolving, Dissolving, Mechanical, Scenic, Panoramic, Dimensional,
Changing, Pop-up and Other Novelty Books from the Collection of David and Briar
Philips (London: New English Library, 1979).
45– For an extended discussion of how changes to form and content of
maps and text in different editions of Ruscelli’s “Orbis descriptio” are used
in his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, see section IV., pp 7–14
46– The often-cited conversation takes place in Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
Abroad (New York: Charles L. Webster & co., 1894).
47– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.,
1937)
48– Gonzalo Arqueros, “Prólogo,” in Notas Visuales: fronteras entre imagen
y escritura, ed. María Elena Muñoz, Francisca Lange, and Ana María Risco
(Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2010), 5–10, at 5.
49– Anne-Marie Christin, “Présentation. De l’image à l’écriture,” in
Histoire de l’écriture. De l’idéogramme au multimedia, ed. Anne-Marie Christin
(Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 1–32, at 14.
50– Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri, “Introduction: Photographic
Interventions,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 72–82, at 74.
51– Michael R. Leaman, “Preface,” in Art, Word and Image: Two Thousand
Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, ed. John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and
Michael Corries (London: Reaktion, 2010), 7–13.
52– Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” Word & Image 9, no.1 (1993): 51–65, at 62.
53– The “annotated” volume, with the map folding out at the rear, is in
the JCB Library. The map was printed for E. Cave in London for
Geography Reformed; or A New System of General Geography. See the copy at
https://archive.org/details/newsurveyofwesti01gage/page/n4. The map
is generally dated between 1740–1755, as with the Library of Congress
copy at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g4390.ar16810(accessed January 5,
2019).
54– Un Cours de géographie où l’on voit au jour la description de toute la terre et sa
division en ses quatre parties avec les terres nouvellement découvertes et leurs habitants.
Avec un traité de la différence des climats et de la navigation sur mer. Anon. MS,
seventeenth century, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ge FF 13341 (94).
Ms/17e siècle.
55– Peter Apian, Isagoge, title page; Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber Petri
Apiani mathematici studiose collectus (Landshut: Johann Weyssenburger, 1524),
52, uses this image to show the winds. It is possible that the author selected
this image from among several prepared for Cosmographicus liber to illustrate
the title page of Isagoge.
56– See also Benedetto Bordone, Isolario di Benedetto Bordone, nel qual si
ragiona di tutte l’isole del mondo … (Venice: N. Zoppino, 1534).
57– Juan López de Velasco, Demarcación y división de las Indias (c.1575), JCB
Library, Codex Sp 7 1-size, 2, f. 5. This interesting manuscript book also
presents evidence of an author annotating his own text.
58– Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds,” 270.
59– For details on the first editions, see articles by Raptis Rare Books
(https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/identifying-the-hobbit-and-lord-of-
140 JORDANA DYM AND CARLA LOIS
the-rings-first-edition-issue-points/); and Wikipedia, “Early American
Editions of the Hobbit: The First Edition,” https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Early_American_editions_of_The_Hobbit#The_first_edition
(accessed August 4, 2019).
60– As Padrón points out, Tolkien sends the reader to “Look at the map
at the beginning of this book, and you will see there the runes in red”
(Mapping Imaginary Worlds, p. 272). This aside is delivered in the book’s
only footnote, a device more commonly used in works of nonfiction.
61– At least one copy of a 1574 Ptolemy edition shows the planisphere
without the southern continent; Ptolemy, La Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo
Alessandrino Orbis Descriptio, … nuova editione de Gio. Malombra (Venice:
Appresso Giordano Ziletti, 1574), n.p., Archive.org, https://archive.org/
details/lageografiadicla00ptol/page/n548. The map showing the conti­
nent appears as Giuseppe Rosaccio, Orbis Descriptio, in Ptolemy, Geografia
di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino … (Venice, 1598), pl., p. 10, National Library
of Australia, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-231872375; and Giuseppe
Rosaccio, Orbis Terrae com pendiosa description, in Ptolemy, Geografia di
Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino …, trans. Girolamo Ruscelli and expanded
by Gioseffo Rosaccio (Venice: [Appressso gli Heredi di Melchior Seffa],
1599), Bk 4, Pt 2, pl. [2], https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-231798572 (accessed
January 6, 2019).
62– Atlas de 5é. Le monde polaire, l’Amérique, l’Asie, l’Océanie (autour du Pacifique ...),
Cours de V[iktor] Prévot; R. Lucas, maps (Paris: Librairie E. Belin, 1971).
63– In this consideration, we are directly and indirectly indebted to the
ideas of Matthew Edney, most recently circulating in The Ideal of
Cartography.
64– Cavallo and Chartier, Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental.
65– Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual
Materials (London: Sage, 2012).
ORCID
Carla Lois http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6687-0696
Appendix
This article offers extensive consideration of central questions
related to the forms in which maps interact with texts, primarily
in the form of bound books, in the modern era. However, we are
conscious of having not fully explored every implication of these
materialities for readers, every material form or physical mode in
which maps integrate with books, or even examples and counter­
examples that might refine the argument. We hope this study,
therefore, opens a conversation and sets the stage to build,
collectively, an enduring perspective of analysis.
With this in mind, we have drawn up an initial list of
guiding methodological questions—which are open to revision
—to orient a systematic and academically rigorous analysis of
the questions raised in the article. Among other inspirations,
we note Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies.65
At the core are two framing questions:
● How does the understanding of a map or set of maps
change when considered within the context of books
and book history?
● How does the understanding of a book or book genre
change when maps and the history of cartography are
included as elements for analysis?
Materiality
● How many and what kind(s) of maps are in a book?
Where are they located in relation to the text? Do
they precede, follow, or accompany the related text(s)?
Are they on the same page or bound separately? How
are they aligned? How is color used?
● How does a book author or publisher indicate the
presence and/or purpose of maps in the book (title
pages, prefaces, in the text)?
● How do materials and technologies of production of
books and maps contribute to individual or collective
map characteristics (size, color, level of detail, etc.)?
● What indications do readers leave (annotations, inser­
tions, excisions, dog earing, rubbing) to show us how
they actually engaged with a map(s)?
● What changes are there if a book is born digital or is
digitized?
Context: production
● How do maps get into a book?
○ Who commissions the maps? Who creates them?
What relationship do map commissioners have
with mapmakers?
○ What role does the commissioner or creator have
in other aspects of the book?
● In what order do maps appear? Is there a cartographic
logic, as well as book logic, to the sequence?
● Do the kinds of maps in a book typically appear in this
genre of text? How does map content connect with the
text?
● How does the publication date influence map form
and/or content?
● How do maps influence the content of a book, its cur­
rency, its market price, and the need for multiple edi­
tions?
Context: consumption
● How does a map form affect book reading? Is a bound
map a self-contained object (including elements such
as title, legend, and creator information), making it
independent of the text? Or must a reader
(simultaneously) consult the text to read/understand/
appreciate the map’s (information)?
● How does map binding, such as folding maps or maps
bound across the binding, affect reading?
● How does reading a map(s) with text or independently
of text change a reader’s understanding of the map(s)
and text?
Significance
● What importance or status do maps have within
a book, and how is a reader to know (size, quantity
of pages, references on title page or table of contents,
role in the main argument, etc.)?
● How are maps and their purpose related to or distinct
from that of other graphic elements in a book (dia­
grams, photographs, caricatures, etc.)?
● What role do maps play in developing, illustrating,
supplementing, synthesizing, or communicating the
text’s central ideas?
○ Is a map meant to be read/consulted or admired/
seen as an aesthetic object?
○ Are map and text statements coherent, contradic­
tory, independent of each other, or indifferent to
each other? Do maps and texts make explicit
references to each other?
○ What does a reader need to know about the book
genre or map genres to answer the question of how
maps contribute to the book’s argument or
purpose?
○ Do maps and texts have an equivalent treatment?
Are images too small to be legible or marginal to
the argument? If the maps are removed, what is
lost?
● Are maps integral to books with multiple editions and/
or published in multiple languages? How, if at all, does
the presence, absence, or redrawing of maps change
between editions, and change a reader’s experience?
● If a reader encounters a volume with missing maps,
how is the experience with the text changed?
● What sources found beyond the original source
material might help answer questions?
WORD & IMAGE 141