Customer Reviews

Surveying the Shore: Historic Maps of Coastal Massachusetts, 1600-1930

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If you like maps, or if you like the history of the Massachusetts shore, you'll love this book by Joseph Garver. Eighty-nine map plates are each beautifully reproduced on a single 8x12 inch page, with a facing page--usually just one--that explains the map. Thus the book is not a detailed scholarly account of either the mapmakers or their subject. At the same time, the explanations are concise, elegant, and erudite, with wonderful pearls that explain how the maps came to be made and about what the maps can tell us of the changing history of the towns. It is more cohesive than Mapping Boston, and more accessible than McCorkle's New England in Early Printed Maps. Garvers is the reference librarian of the Harvard Map Collection, and it shows, both in the broad collection of maps he has located from ten different collections, and in the deep knowledge of mapmaking revealed in the text.

great book except that the maps are too small. I don't understand why all the maps needed to be orientated up, it means that most of the pages are 75% blank white paper and thus make the maps extremely small and hard to read. Kinda strange for a map book?


great book, but whoever was the layout editor should be fired...