Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed (Hardcover)

~ David Rumsey (Author), Edith M. Punt (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A high-quality album consisting of 120 historical maps, principally of North America, this work hints at the future of cartography, which is being revolutionized by a sophisticated mapping technology called geographic information systems (GIS). Several maps here, such as a depiction of the route of Lewis and Clark, exhibit how GIS can meld historic information with remote-sensing data. The authors' captions explain the technology underlying the images. The owner of a collection containing more than 100,000 cartographic artifacts, Rumsey is systematically digitizing his maps and posting them at http://www.davidrumsey.com. This is presumably for the benefit of GIS specialists, while this book will satisfy those who simply want to see a beautiful historical map. The viewer will encounter the maps of John Fremont, bird's-eye perspectives of cities, and the maps of the American West made by the U.S. Geological Survey in the late 1800s. Although it is costly, this work is sure to wow map fans. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Description

David Rumsey's collection of historical maps is one of the largest and most complete of its kind. Focused for the most part on North and South America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the collection is comprised of more than 150,000 items: maps, atlases, and contextual supporting documents. Unlike similar collections, the delicacy and rarity of which necessitate careful storage and restricted use policies, The Rumsey Collection is available in its entirety on the Web and it is this conjunction of old and new technologies that is the heart of Cartographica Extraordinaire.

The maps selected for Cartographica Extraordinaire tell a hundred distinct, exciting, important, and sometimes controversial stories, along two main paths of inquiry: how did a continental wilderness become a civilization, and how has the development of cartographic science changed the ways we perceive, describe, study, and use that land?Geographic information systems have come, as part of the digital revolution, to dominate the cartography of today, but GIS didn't leap into being out of nowhere; all its processes and capabilities have precursors in historical maps. Old maps can therefore tell us not only the stories of their subject matter, but stories about the nature of mapmaking as well: its exigencies and limitations, trends and developments-its theory and practice and what that tells us about the people we were, are, and will be.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Esri Press; 1 edition (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589480449
• ISBN-13: 978-1589480445
• Product Dimensions: 13.6 x 13 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #839,602 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History Through Illuminating Maps, September 15, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

David Rumsey was fascinated by maps as a kid, and they were always papered onto the walls of his room. The fascination with maps did not leave him, through several degrees in fine art and a career in real estate. He amassed one of the largest private collections of maps, The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, 150,000 catalogued items stored on the ground floor of his house in San Francisco, which is a working library for people to use. The items are wall maps, folding maps, globes, map puzzles, and many others. There is a sampling of the collection in _Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed_ (ESRI Press) by David Rumsey and Edith M. Punt, a slim but large-paged, handsome volume containing all kinds of maps concentrating on North America. They show the history of America, to be sure, but are also a history of mapmaking. Rumsey has painstakingly put items in his collection on the Internet, so he himself is participating in mapmaking history, and some pages of this beautiful book demonstrate what can be done with maps transformed into pixels.

Looking at these lovely maps is to participate a bit in Rumsey's enthusiasm, which one can pick up from his introduction: "A map, especially a historical map, ... communicates both above and below the narrow bands of language and observation." There are only a hundred and twenty or so maps selected here, but besides being beautiful objects to contemplate, they show an amazingly diverse range of ideas: how people explored coasts, or how train schedules were arranged before we had standard time zones, or how we claimed, organized, and sold the land. For those of us who only look at highway maps, there is an enormous education here. It is barely possible to mention the subjects of some of these maps; if this subject matter at all interests you, nothing will do except to get the book itself and look through the pages. For instance, the map by William Clark (of Lewis and Clark) of the trek across western America is here, but in a version issued by Rumsey in celebration of the 200th anniversary of their travels. It shows the original drawing, seamlessly enclosed within the General Land Survey's first map of the area, which is itself within a 1971 map of a US Geographic Survey National Atlas, which in turn is within a Landsat mosaic from NASA. The joins of the maps are seamless because they all were turned into computer data that could be massaged in just the right way, and because they are "georectified" to match up perfectly. This was hardest to do with Clark's 1814 map, which because of survey and navigation limitations of his time (not because of sloppy mapmaking) had accurate latitudes and distorted longitudes.

Rumsey's collection exists physically, of course, but access to the historical maps entailed the basic problem of "many hands taking hold of rare and delicate objects." Digital photography and computer storage have opened his collection for anyone who wants to look, and you don't even have to be there physically. He has found that magnified images of the maps can show details that were obscure even in the originals. Astonishingly, information compression has meant that a picture that originally required 400 megabytes can actually be stored in 3% of that size without loss of image quality. By digitizing his maps and making them available, Rumsey has himself stepped into cartographic history. This book is a demonstration in book form of what Geographic Information Systems can do, and Rumsey sees the "digital wizardry of GIS not as a break from the past and old mapping traditions," but part of those traditions. If you go to the website, you can look around anywhere; there is no guide. _Cartographica Extraordinaire_, on the other hand, has the job of demonstrating the progress of history and of information display, and does both engagingly and handsomely.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding and representative collection, July 9, 2004

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

The impressively collaborative work of David Rumsey (President of Cartography Associates, a San Francisco-based digital publishing company, and Director of Luna Imaging, a provider of enterprise software for online image collections) and Edith M. Punt (professional cartographer and recipient of the 1996 National Geographic Award in Cartography), Cartographica Extraordinaire: The Historical Map Transformed is a 160-page, hardcover, coffee-table book printed on archival paper which showcases how technology has literally transformed the restoration, re-creation and reproduction of historical maps. The specific focus is upon maps (and the people who made them) that reflect American history and ranges from a 1736 atlas depicting California as an island, to a Civil War era "bird's-eye" view of military positions on the southeastern seaboard. This is an outstanding and representative collection drawn from the David Rumsey Map Collection and illustrates early American history from a uniquely geographic perspective. With it's informed and informative text, Cartographica Extraordinaire is clearly recommended for inclusion into professional, academic and community library Cartography Studies or American History collections. Indeed, Cartographica Extraordinaire would make an excellent selection for a truly unique Library Memorial Fund acquisition.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Maps: A Fascinating Study, June 16, 2004

By A Customer

Maps are fascinating and CARTOGRAPHICA EXTRAORDINAIRE takes us back to the beginnings of mapping what we know now as the United States. It reveals such mysteries as how a survey of a piece of land in California is tied to a point on the north shore of the Ohio River. One can look at how the land was settled and mapped in Illinois or examine an early map of Boston and compare it with the transformation by Frederick Olmstead. This is a book for history buffs.