VII. J. H. Colton

By the 1850s, Joseph Hutchins Colton (1800-1893) was the preeminent U.S. geographic publisher. Working in New York, he produced a wide variety of guidebooks, atlases, wall maps [map 33], gazetteers, pocket maps [34], and travel guides covering all parts of the country. His maps generally possessed distinctive, ornate borders (an exception being map 37). Colton’s two-volume Atlas of the World, attributed to his son George Woolworth Colton (1827-1901), featured a Maine map that appeared in no less than twelve updated versions between 1855 and 1860 [35-36].