Western Air Lines commissioned De Long to create this vividly colored pictorial map, which uses the polar azimuthal projection common on many “Air Age” maps. Yellow fish and animals hark back to the wondrous creatures shown on medieval maps.
26. Sally De Long, Our New Neighbors: Projected Global Air Routes showing Great Circle Mileages between Important Cities of the World (1944).
Stephen J. Hornsby Collection
URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/4000174
Plummer created this boldly designed and richly colored pictorial map for Country Gentleman magazine. A celebration of America, the map highlights each state’s most remarkable natural and cultural sites and historical figures. The center of the map is dominated by a sunflower, the state flower of Kansas.
27. W. Kirtman Plummer, America (1953).
Stephen J. Hornsby Collection
URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/4000175
With its gleaming modernist skyscrapers, new United Nations building, trans-Atlantic liners, and newly introduced jet passenger planes, New York is shown as the greatest city of the postwar world. The map’s brilliant colors, particularly the yellow for the sun-reflected buildings, create visual drama and suggest something of the city’s extraordinary energy.
28. Nils Hansell, Wonders of New York (ca. 1958).
Stephen J. Hornsby Collection
URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/4000176
Created a decade after Nils Hansell’s Wonders of New York, Holtan’s view of Los Angeles presents a much different picture of urban America. Pepto-Bismol pink and smoggy brown sky set the tone. Under a sickened sun, landmarks such as City Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, LAX, and Watts Towers are interspersed among smoke-belching factories, busy freeways, and a sinking ship.
29. Gene Holtan, Los Angeles (1968).
Stephen J. Hornsby Collection
URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/4000177
New York bank Merril Lynch commissioned Ramus, a commercial artist and cartoonist, to create this gently satirical pictorial map of the moon landing. Ramus shows presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon on the back of a bald eagle flying over a double-hemisphere map of the moon. He also includes scenes from the history of manned flight, as well as star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, Galileo looking through his telescope, and an onion-domed Soviet spacecraft. Several delightful touches include the sun jumping over the moon and the Apollo rocket blasting off from earth to form the north arrow of the compass. With its sepia coloring and scrolled title, the map looks back to the printed maps of the 1600s, but its subversive humor is typical of the late 1960s.
30. M. Ramus, Myths Maps & Men: Merril Lynch Salutes the Year of the Moon (1969).
Stephen J. Hornsby Collection
URL: www.oshermaps.org/map/4000178
