Ace Jet 170

Waterworld

 

Oxfam Bookshop, some time last year. Two tattered volumes from around 1910 of technical data relating to the waterways of the UK. Edge to edge text. But…throughout one volume, maps. Flipping beautiful maps.

Annotated with proposals for new works, overprinted with routes, amendments and notable features, the maps looked as fresh and clean as the day they were born.

That overprinted text. Lovely.

 

 

The staff found them tricky to price, with no real precedent, and I actually paid more than they asked for. There's a bargain and then there's fair play.

 

Paris in your pocket

 

I've always said that I only really miss two things about England: Pubs and London. We took full advantage of both while we could, wandering and drinking as we went — the perfect way to enjoy a city.

I found this in the Oxfam Bookshop on the Portobello Road and snaffled it up for the surprisingly tiny price of £1.99. I have a weakness for pocket city guides. Imagine wandering the streets of Paris with this in hand instead of your phone. 

 

1963

 

 

I'm just going to leave this here. Picked it up a few weeks ago from the Seaside Revival Festival. We were lamenting the demise of the printed guide when we were in New York. I remember the first time I was there and how I was very self-conscious about pulling out my guide book, particularly in some of the dodgier corners I found myself.

I guess Googling your current and intended whereabouts is more discrete but a tourist is a tourist and isn't not going to stand out, particularly in some of the dodgier places we found ourselves.

Our lamentation was somewhat fuelled by roaming avoidance and battery level anxiety of course.

 

Peter Saville meets Alfred Wainwright

 

 

Extracted from Ordnance Survey map keys, actually from a 1975 metric edition of B. Lockey's The interpretation of Ordnance Survey maps and geographical pictures. I've got plans for them. Isolated like this, 'Saville vs. Wainwright' sprang to mind.

Unfolding Antwerp

 

 

1911, and little did the photo-etchers at Southampton's Ordnance Survey Office know, as they beavered away at their photo-etchings, that a soon to be formed Serbo-Croat nationalist group's resentment for the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Turkey would manifest itself in the brutal assassination of the Archduke of Austria and his wife by Serbian student Gavrilo Princip.

The etchers were as surprised as the printer when it all kicked off after that, with the Austrian government blaming the Serbian government; Germany offering to back-up the Austrians who promptly declared war on Serb-kind; Russia mobilised, calling on France to get stuck in; The Germans declared war on France and Britain declared war on Germany because they wouldn't get their troops out of neutral Belgium.

Them etchings ain't gonna etch themselves.

 

Ernest Hemisphere

 

 

Have I mentioned I love my job? Actually, have I mentioned what my job is? Yes, obvs, I'm a graphic designer but it would be more accurate to, now, describe me as an interpretation designer. I used to 'do brochures and stuff', now I do 'exhibitions and that'.

We (that is, Tandem) use the term 'Interpretation Design' (a specific discipline that I wasn't familiar with until I stumbled into my current position nearly five years ago) because what we do is much more than exhibition design. It encompasses exhibition design and lots of other disciplines too. As our Lord High Prophet of Interpretation, Freeman Tilden, described it, it is a discipline that encompasses many disciplines.

So now I design exhibitions…and visitor experiences and museums and interior spaces and interior interventions and architectural interventions and environmental interventions and wayfinding and public art and interpretive graphics…all underpinned by principles set out by the main man just over sixty flipping years ago.

Lots of what we do is connected to heritage or cultural stuff. So I often find myself rummaging through the kind of things I would love to rummage through whether I had this job or not. And often I'm lead down tracks I'm not meant to take.

Last week, I was looking for historical illustrated maps and found dealer in antique maps and atlases Barry Lawrence Rudermann. What an amazing image database Bazza has! Ever since I bought my first atlas I've considered the poles to be the finest of cartographic delights. While BLR may have a different preference there is much Pole action to be had.

 

Is that Switzerland in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

My interest in cartography intensifies inline with the concentration of cartography. Sheets are lovely but an atlas! With an atlas comes a frenzy of map-joy. And a pocket guide! A small, maption-packed book…with cloth-bound, foil-blocked cover…and a plethora of tipped-in fold-out maps. Man alive! 

On a recent drive to Galway (a four hour slog from Belfast) I listened to an episode of the BBC's Seriously podcasts. It was a spliced together collection of recordings of Roald Dhal, talking about his past. It's great. Amongst all the things he touches on is what an adventure travel used to be. It still is, of course, but not like it was back in the day.

Obviously, you might still purchase a pocket guide for your holiday – and that guide might still be a thing of beauty, albeit super-efficiently mass-produced – but may I suggest that the reduction in adventurial magic that Mr Dahl refers to is directly proportional to the reduction in production investment in pocket guide production. Needless to say, I'm sure the cover price also reflects this difference.

Europe in Maps

Here's real treasure for the map fiend: A topographical study of the region known as Europe. I remember Europe – some of it is just below us and there's a much bigger bit over on the other side of the British mainland. We used to holiday there when it was easy to do that, before the walls went up. I liked being in Europe…then one day…one dark day in the 2016, just over half the voting population of Great Britain decided they wanted to leave. Mostly for stupid reasons. But that is, as they say, history. We won't dwell on that.

Still, nice maps: a geographical study based on extracts from large scale maps of European countries featuring the natural environment, agricultural regions, areas of industry that it'll be harder to do business with now and both urban and rural settlements that we are no longer free to visit because an ill-informed population were invited to decide on something they were wholly unqualified to decide on. But as I've already said, let's not dwell on that particular clusterfuck.

Instead let's marvel at the myriad of lines, tones, colours and typography deployed to describe these now more distant regions. 

Thankfully, the beauty of cartography is not influenced by poor socio-political referendums and we can still enjoy the skills and artistry of drafts-people from countries with whom we are no longer unified economically.

Back in The 'Ham

I was over in my old stomping ground the other week, seeing my Mum who wasn't too well, and I managed to squeeze in a conflab with that man Luke Tonge, off of the Internet and the Monotype Recorder and Boat and other things. Anywho, he gave me this, which was terribly nice of him…not least because he also bought me a pint. Hope to return the favour when I'm in The 'Ham again.

The Penrose Annual 1976 Volume 69

For most of my Penrose Annual collecting career, to date, I've concentrated on the 60s. But I've come to realise the following decade has lots to offer. As phototypesetting took hold, memories of letterpress-as-standard still prevailed and also the 70s witnessed some amazing designers at work in various graphic arts.

Paul Piech had began to publish from his private press in 1959, his wood and linocuts full of purpose and protest. Follow that link, from his name, and you'll see what I mean. For this edition of Penrose, he cut motifs to illustrate an article on Caxton as well as being the focus of a piece by Kenneth Hardacre.

Tom Eckersley was in his sixties by now but his poster work was still breaking ground. There's plenty of supporting evidence in this edition to prove that.

A superb piece on the Kelmscott Chaucer gives background on the original and goes on to describe the production of a facsimile copy of the Morris/Burne-Jones masterpiece. I'm going to do a separate post about that.

David Gentleman's here, thanks to Mel Calman who wrote the article which is illustrated with finished work alongside examples of Gentleman's design developments.

As is standard with Penrose, there's a ton of other stuff including an article on the reproduction of old maps and graphic design from Canada – and then the usual technical developments of the day.

I've uploaded more highlights to Flickr.

Hachette Job

'Twas the tenth year of the second millennium whence I happened upon a somewhat modest volume inside which there was to be found, described in line and word, a city so French it is now known by some as…Paris. 

Remarkably, by an unholy coincidence, by fortuitous happenstance, exactly and precisely five years, two months, one week and three days later I chanced upon this quite different and similar bound collection of papers that describes, in word and line, the very same different land of somewhere else. Italia.

You can click on each image for a closer look.

Extract No. 214/167

Popped into my favourite secondhand bookshop this morning.

Who knows what you might find?!

Shelves of partly thumbed, half read chick-lit and abandoned Harry Potters. Classical vinyl and the same reference books that were there one, two, four, eight years back. Series' on popular art and travel books for everywhere except where you want to go.

An OS Extract Sheet of Salisbury.

Where I've never lived.

 

 

I bumped into Alan Fletcher in Cortona…

Thirteen years ago we honeymooned near to Cortona, in the Italian province of Arezzo. We were staying near the top of an adjacent hill and most evenings would drive down from our love nest and up into the birth place of Futurist artist Gino Severini. Cortona was also the setting for Frances Mayes' 1998 International Best Seller Under The Tuscan Sun which was adapted into the damn awful film of the same same. Mayes must have been raging. I didn't read the book but I did eat the peach tart that Karen made from Mayes' recipe and it was excellent.

About four weeks ago we went back.

Cortona was and still is a beautiful hill top Tuscan town. It's busier than it was thirteen years ago, maybe a little more highfalutin, café prices a little higher. The main street has a few new shops including a fascinating den of objet d'art and ephemera. Mostly way out of our price range but I did fork out a handful of euros for two maps, neither of which featured Cortona but nevertheless held cartographic delights amongst their folds.

Both from the Touring Club Italiano, I can't find a print date on the older sheet but the younger espresso-stained sheet is from 1967 and comes complete with a pre-Pentagram Alan Fletcher designed Pirelli ad on the back. The ad was first seen in 1962 when Fletcher brought his tyre company client back to the UK as he joined up with Forbes and Gill.

I was checking out my facts when I stumbled across the Alan Fletcher Archive. Well worth a few hours of your time. For me it all brought back memories of that other trip.

Large Output

We're just back from none of the places on these particular maps. We were in Umbria. Under the 38°C rays I had plenty of time to contemplate life, the universe and orange coloured drinks served with salty snacks. In that delightful and alien environment I had a thought: I'm going to start blogging again. Not that I'd actually, really, formally stopped. But I had drifted away, got side-lined, became distracted. By life and children and work.

We came back with a bunch of stuff worth capturing in the digital form so I'll get it up here over the next week or so.

 

 

 

 

These maps are from a German atlas, from 1958, that I picked up a little while back and have leafed through during occasional spare moments. I think the photos are a bit dodgy because I just used my phone but it's really the colours and diverse cartographic styles that interest me most and the images capture those details reasonably well.

Historic Overlay

Just for the record – and in reference to yesterday's post – I found what I was looking for on the marvellous Ordnance Survey Ireland website.

Accidental Ohio

I mentioned a while back that I'm working in a studio that specialises in interpretive design. There aren't really that many specialists in the UK; in Northern Ireland, Tandem is the only one. I'm there for just a while and the specialism is new to me – but I have to say, it's very interesting work.

The discipline of interpretive design is, in itself, interesting and I'll say more about that another time. What's immediately interesting is the material it brings you into contact with – whether by chance or by design (pardon the pun).

Earlier today I was trying to find a map of Dublin, circa 1916. What I found was an online archive of historical maps of Ohio (there's a Dublin in Ohio) from the early part of the twentieth century.

If you click on these snippets of mappage you'll be able to scrutinise the beautiful details.

 

West South Central

Just before I went all quiet Elizabeth, in Texas, very kindly sent me a package packed full of road maps from her part of the world. And then I went quiet. It was months ago. If you're still with me Elizabeth: I must apologise for this ridiculous delay — life has just been getting in the way. The photographs have been sitting in this blog post, waiting for some words, since way before the summer. Great cartographics. Many thanks for sending them and I hope your move went well.

Czech Book

If you follow me on Twitter (What do you mean you don't?) then you may have noticed that every now and then I tweet links to old blog posts. It struck me a while back that there's loads of stuff buried in the archives that many might have either missed or forgotten. On a personal level I've really enjoyed re-visiting all the old stuff. Stuff of days gone by. From back in the day…etc, etc.

Some of the really early stuff, I think, warrants more than just a tweet. Way back then I only posted a few images. This pack of maps for example, from when Czechoslovakia was still a Central European Sovereign State was barely covered.

I picked it up in Prague when I was on my Stag Weekend. By day, we stalked secondhand bookshops; by night we got rat-arsed on Absinth and inexpensive Czech beers. Ah, if these maps could talk…

Vignelli Transit Maps

Published by the RIT Press Vignelli Transit Maps tells the rise and fall story of the celebrated New York subway map, from its preliminary sketches, through its publishing and on to its demise. Lavishly illustrated, the book is an appropriately dignified and detailed monument to a significant icon of graphic design history.

38°46′N 9°9′W

My colleague Sam (Irwin) picked this up from The Shop With No Name months ago. 

It's kind of weird and really interesting. Loads of the pages are foreshortened to create a many-tabbed thing. But the maps are the best bits. Simply printed and a bit clumbsy.

Sheet Head #8

I don't know what these things are called. You know, the distance matrix so you know how far it is between cities. The unsung hero of the road map.

Sheet Head #7

Just when you thought it was safe, they return. And you've still got Johnny to thank.

Sheet Head #6

Maps courtesy of the marvellous Johnny Cullen.

Sheet Head #5

Maps courtesy of the marvellous Johnny Cullen.

Sheet Head #4

Cool modernist typography; fresh, clean colours; this sheet reminds me of Vignelli.

Maps courtesy of the marvellous Johnny Cullen.

Sheet Head #3

This is a lovely sheet. Two colours. Quite roughly drafted with that red haphazardly overprinted; it looks like someone's just drawn over the black linework.

Maps courtesy of the marvellous Johnny Cullen.

Sheet Head #2

Conoco sheets are a bit cranky, the font is a bit dodgy and the blue plate feels a little heavily printed. But what's most disconcerting, perhaps quite peculiar to the US (I don't know), is how straight and gridly the road systems are.

Sheet Head #1

Johnny (Euston, do you copy) Cullen knows I like a good map. Disparities in colour scheme, typography, level of detail, branding and other trappings are fascinating. There seems to be no end of variation. Johnny very generously sent me a box full of maps from the US he found in a charity shop. There's loads of them; what you see here is but a small sample.

It was such a generous thing to do and there are so many different designs that I thought they deserved their own series. Hence that…ehum…"special" heading.

Temporary Herbster

Truly, madly, deeply honoured to be writing this month for Herb Lester's Journal. During October I'll be offering a smattering of sneaky peeks into some of my favouraite bits of Belfast, opening up with the easily missed but highly evocative Linen Hall Library.

Michelin Man

About the time we went to France, at the beginning of the summer, ex-pat print maestro (and acely named) Merrick Angle very kindly sent me a whole bunch of old European Michelin maps, to add to my joyful, if purposeless, collection. By far my favourite bits (have I said this before?) are where the map kind of haemorrhages into the margins. 

Dead Man's Stuff

I get my hair cut at The Best Little Hair House in Belfast. Often on a Saturday. But you don't really want to know that do you? Andrew does it usually. A wee snip here and there, leave it messy please, a little more off the front. And while he clips and cuts, we always have a nice chat about what's going on. He's got his ear to the ground. He knows stuff.

None of this is relevent to be honest except that on my way home afterwards I tend to take a sneaky peak in at the charity bookshop en route. If I'm lucky I might pick up a…Pelican (or a Penguin). Last Saturday though I picked up a whole different bundle of shit. Tucked in behind the atlases (atlas's? atli?) was a murky old folder. Interesting, I thought, what's in that then?

Well this is what was in that. 

It turns out the previous owner of the folder was a seafaring type. In fact, there he is. Perhaps recently deceased, in his earlier, very much more alive days, I imagine nothing could keep that grin on his face like setting sail for a voyage of adventure around the British Isles. My favourite thing though is that chart at the bottom there. That's Stangford Lough, which locals will know and is a very beautiful part of NI - and encompasses our favourite place, Castle Ward.

Anyway, a folder full of dead mans shit: £1. Thank you very much.

Paris pour des chercheurs de plaisir

Anyone who knows the language well will see straight through my sorry attempt at French. A feable auto-translation does little to reflect the subtlties of its poetic intonations. Herb Lester's new map, on the otherhand, is an all-round impressive effort; guiding us skillfully through the regular and irregular pleasure spots that the city has to offer the seeker.

 

 

Wolverartmap

Claire from Substrakt very kindly sent me a copy of their Art Map of Wolverhapton. OK, I kind of wangled one off her using a contact, charm and some begging. Mostly a contact and begging, I'm not so good with the other. Whatever the combination it worked. Another excellent map for the collection, this one revealling the public art and culturally interesting corners of the city not so far away from where I was born. 

The Berlin Trawl

Herb's latest guide will take you on a back street tour of the one-time Prussian, now German capital's unknown pleasures. Design and illustration by Brooklyn-based Ed Nacional. 

Unable to attend

Pssst!

Don't tell anyone, but I've been invited to something secret. Can't tell you where. Or when. Can't tell you anything, it's a secret. Can't tell you who's invited me or what it's all about. Better not tell you what that badge is for or what that invitation card says. Can't tell you why I'm not able to go either. You might not believe me anyway. Can't say anything.

Weights and Measures

I don't know about you but the first thing I do with a jacketed volume is to slip its outer cover off for a sneaky peek at what lies beneath. And who could resist a copy Concise Practical Surveying? It's got a great cover, but undressed not only is that spine type lovely, the inside of the outer hides essential survey samples.

 

 

 

View Finder

Mega mapage. Nearly four years ago Jonathan (insect54) Turner emailed me images of his Wim Crouwel/Total Design designed de grote bosatlas. I may be wrong but the impression I get from a swift Google is that this is a kind of Dutch National Atlas, with numerous editions that span many years (the first printed in 1877!).

Jonathan's was from 1968 and has a design credit. The one I found last weekend at Castleward is from 1976. And while it isn't credited to anyone, I do feel the cover type (Helvetica instead of the earlier Akzidenz Grotesk) is a little more elegant. Perhaps it's a bit too perfect. Of course, the real star is the astonishingly diverse and masterfully drafted content.

Lettres Françaises

Herb's fairly rattling through the mappages now. This time he airmailed Lord Dunsby to Paris to sketch the locals and draft that fabulous lettering. Wherever next I wonder? My money's on Prestatyn.

East End Boys

Those lovely fellows at Herb Lester had done it yet again. This time they looked east for their inspiration. Not very far east, to be honest, but that's not important. The Herbster's latest outing is a guide to the usual and unusual delights of the Eastern End of London. Art Direction is by Studio Booth and the fab and groovy maplstrations are by Telegramme. You can buy any of Herb Lester's maps here.

Hell, throw caution to the wind and just buy them all!

Geologics

Alex got in touch, after that last post about maps, to tell me about the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland that he's been involved with. The website Alex point me to has an amazing body of scanned historical maps from the 19th century. I really like the coastal areas but the island's interior is lavishly represented by beautiful draughts of lush line and colour work. Well worth further exploration.

NI/OS

A quick Googling of "Ordinance Survey Maps" backs up my general feeling about OS cartographies: expanses of open land tend to be white so their sheets feel clean and fairly clinical. Unlike the Bartholomew. They've always used a much richer colour palette. Their sheets are lush. So these then are an anomaly: OS maps of NI, from 1963, that feel more like Bartholomew renderings. Who can explain this strange and unexpected phenomena?

Route Master

Less mappery, perhaps a little more elegance: it's BOAC's masterful Route Map No.3.

Long-haul

Before BA was BA it had an O and a C. And some rather lovely illustrations. And routes.

City & Royal Burgh

What a find! Joe Sharpe, at Applied Works, happened upon this Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh while staying in the City recently. It's an amazing piece of work. I'm a tad jealous. You can read more about it here.

Eye Maps

Talking of maps, if you don't happen to have the latest Eye, you should probably get yourself a copy. I don't subscribe. But, casually leafing through Sam's, it occurred to me that I must have one. So I nicked his. Sorry Sam; it's mine now.

 

The cover is the cat's meow. A beautiful reproduction of one of Joost Grootens stunning maps for the Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line. For the main article John L Walters (interestingly, a founding member of 80s "Einstein A Go-go" performers Landscape) talks to Grootens about his unique approach to mappery. 

Eye have generously illustrated the piece with numerous examples of Grootens work but you can get a feel for his atlas's physicality from this video.

And if that wasn't a good enough reasons to buy a copy (and trust me, it is) there's also a fantastic article on David Gentleman. It's also where we found the font we're using for the "The Zimbabwean" part of the masthead.

Datz NYC

Another joyous fold-out from the masters of the minor attraction Herb Lester. This time it's the lesser spotted hot spots of my favourite city. So good they named it, well, once, then named the state the same thing so it sounds kind of silly. But we love it anyway. This particular Herbism is illustrated by ace New Yorkan illustrator Jim Datz. Datz is brilliant, you can see his other works here. And staffle up your copy of the Lester square (rectangle really) here.

The Energy Report

Applaudable (high res) mappery on Footprint today. Visualized by Reinier de Graaf and Laura Baird from OMA's design research studio AMO. Definitely worth downloading the full, 256 page (17mb), WWF/ECOFYS/OMA report from the ECOFYS website.

Herbrospective

This is the third map from Herb Lester Associates, and actually, I'd say, the best. This time we're back in the 60s with Wish You Were Here guiding us around the swingingest hipster hang-outs.

Beer Map

Nicholas Felton has designed the Beer Map for the Build Conference this week. That's all. Oh, and Jessica Hische is talking tonight at UU. And there's some other stuff going on too.

V&A and him and her and whatsit and thingy

Mr Johnson very kindly sent me a full set of the V&A and me maps that johnsonbanks revealed to the world recently (OK, I coerced them from him). They are amazing. I love them because: a) they're amazing, and b) they're a good example, in my view, of minimum means (unfolded, they're a standard A2 sheet) but maximum effect; if I were visiting the V&A during the London Design Festival and picked one of these up I'd be delighted with my free souvenir. 

If you're not up to speed with the idea: for each leaflet a particular creative type was asked what they liked most about the Museum. Favourites were then plotted onto a custom-designed map-like layout; the "maps" then folded in an unconventional way so that the contents of each piece can be glimpsed when it is closed.

The invited creative luminaries included: Paul Smith, Nick Rhodes, Anya Hindmarch, museum director Sir Mark Jones, hat man Stephen Jones, Erin O'Connor and Florence (and the Machine) Welch…amongst others.

There's more to read on JB's blog.