The Colour of an Old City A Map of Boston by artists Edwin Olsen (1902-1996) and Blake Clark (1900-1979) and published by venerable Boston book publisher Houghton Mifflin, copyright 1926 is both art and cartography. There is so much historical imagery in the patchwork scene depicting the City of Boston, and so much history and imagery designed into the pictorial frame that surrounds the bird's eye view of the City of Boston that one almost does not know where to begin. Our stroll through the map, in excerpts below, are not linear but historical.
The beauty of the map is that one can read from all directions. There is a game like quality to the map that strongly resembles American late 19th c. to c1926 McLoughlin board games.1/ The 1926 viewer's eye was thus already trained to read this map. This pictorial map belongs in the context of American"walking throughout a scene" maps and games and other entertaining, educational and sometimes exotic color lithographs.2/ The Colour of an Old City A Map of Boston uses British English in the title to tease the reader into walking the streets of Colonial Boston, Revolutionary War Boston and also 19th c. Boston. Olsen and Clark use airplanes to guide our gaze aloft where the artists express modernity by drawing colorful airplanes, Boston's first civilian airplanes. Boston Airport opened only in 1923 for military use, and in 1927 for its first commercial flights (of course, to New York). The joke is ours: our modern bird's eye view The Colours of an Old City A Map of Boston now includes looking down on air planes.
The Olsen and Clark The Colour of an Old City Map of Boston is the first in a series of three 1926 city maps that they drew for Houghton Mifflin 3/ that met with commercial success. There is a tongue in cheek humor in the text of the map. And history is presented with some satire.The map is modern. This remarkable example of The Colour of an Old City Map of Boston was found in its original printed presentation envelope, and appears to be unused. This 1926 map's commercial success 4/ guaranteed that the genre of witty, pictorial maps would follow us for decades 5/ and into the 21st century.
Excerpts from Olsen and Clark's Colour of an Old City Map of Boston:
1. The frame of the map has an historic map in each corner: Bonner's 1722 Map of Boston, Paul Revere's 1768 Cut of Boston, a 1776 map of Boston and top left remarkably what we now call a "geo-referenced" map of Old Boston superimposed upon the current filled footprint of the city with Boston Harbor, South Boston, the Back Bay filled from the lowered Beacon Hill.
2. The map has a key What It's All About ! that is a ditty: "This is a map of Boston Town, A historic city of wide renown Rather like a crazy quilt...Tis no engineering feat of surveyed miles and buildings neat..But in some corner if you search, you'll find out where to go to church...And for the dusty historian who seeks the spots & legends...The Old North Church and State House grand And for burial grounds there's quite a demand...For the intellectually inclined librairies and halls were kept in mind Theatres hotels and City Hall...Docks, wharves, ferry boats swans cows and billy goats All this before your eyes notwithstanding the small size we offer in this ditty Colour of an Old City,"as a costumed actor, hat doffed bows to the audience, the map's readers.
3. Modern sites are labeled "Jordan Marsh (not a swamp)", and historic sites Bunker Hill monument with one fellow yelling up to his friend "What do you see?" and air planes buzz above the Charles River.
4. A scale with a caliper reads "500 ' equals 1 inch" that makes this map a walker's guide.
5. The publisher's offices at 2 Park Street are not shown, but the Old Corner Book Store is drawn and labeled, also Tichnor, a company founder's first book shop.
6. Typical Boston houses have silly sayings but in fact are real architectural types:"I am a Fat House...I am a house with only one bay...I am a tall house...I am a small house...And I am a picture of decay." The map artists were architects.
7. A big Frog occupies the Public Garden near a very large squirrel. Scale is Alice in Wonderland.
8. North Station and South Station are prominent and have toy trains entering and leaving the station. Even in 1926, a bicyclist is shown pedaling along Columbus Avenue.
Notes
1. Let’s Play! 100 Years of Board Games | SFO Museum
2. please see the American Antiquarian Society collection of McLoughlin Co. children's games and books . McLoughlin Bros. Collection | American Antiquarian Society
3. A Kite View of Philadelphia and the Sesqui Centennial Internationa Exposition, 1926 and Map of the city of Washington in the District of Columbia shewing the architecture and history from the most ancient times down to the present - Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center
4. Englishman Macdonald Gill's Wonderground map of London (1914) is oft cited for having inspired Olsen and Clark although the London Underground is a technical layout that is anything but a crazy quilt. See, Elisabeth Burdon, The Cartographic Impact of MacDonald Gill's Wonderground Map of 1913 | ABAA
5. Published by the Milwaukee Sentinel Commemorating Its One Hundredth Anniversary June 27, 1937, copyright 1932 by Erwin F. Bahlmann; Map of New York City, Richard Edes Harrison, 1939; Geo.Walker & Co.'s entire pictorial oeuvre.