Adaptive Reuse of Maps
By John Krygier, in Category Map Design, Map History May 11th, 2007While goofing around on eBay I came across a curious sheet of old Latvian stamps:
In 1918, at the close of World War 1, Latvia experienced a shortage of paper. The Germans had withdrawn from Latvia, but left behind a significant number of topographic maps printed on high quality paper. Nothing made more sense than to adapt these surplus topographic maps for a different use – as postage stamps. (images from this eBay auction)
The stamps were printed on the verso of the topographic maps, perforated, and the map side was gummed. Nearly twelve thousand map sheets were converted into stamps in this manner. A huge amount of information about these map stamps (including many images) can be found at the Latvian Map Stamps page.
Adaptive reuse is a term typically used in the context of buildings. The Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan, where I teach, is the old city post office. It actually works really well as an art gallery, with the tall ceilings, great natural light, and solid early 20th century architecture.
In both these examples, something is designed for one purpose, then redesigned for another that was probably never anticipated by the designer of the initial item. For adaptive reuse to work, there has to be something about the original that makes sense in the design and creation of the new item. What better than a topographic map with its quality paper, sheet size, and absence of printing on the back to make a great sheet of stamps. Folded road maps, printed on both sides wouldn’t do, nor would many other maps. Another example of the adaptive reuse of maps is New England Cartographics’ Geolopes (or Topolopes) - envelopes and stationery created from surplus topographic maps from the U.S. Geologic Survey (and other agencies).
There is, of course, a philosophy behind such metamorphoses – reuse, recycle, redesign – rather than make new… sustainability, save the world, and so on. Probably not what the Latvians were thinking, but it was what they were doing.
The Adaptive Reuse blog covers a diversity of objects redesigned to be something else, but a search of its archives doesn’t turn up anything about adaptive reuse of maps. There must be other examples of adaptive reuse of maps, but I am not sure of the alternative – maps that adaptively reuse media designed for some other use. If you know of any let me know.
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May 12th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Thanks for the link. I can give you a rather appalling example. In my first job I worked as a trainee librarian in the pictures section of the Mitchell Library, the major historical library in Sydney. Part of my job was refiling all the photos that had been requested by readers. These were historical photos kept in plastic folders each backed with a sheet of white paper. I noticed over time that some of the white paper had printing on the back that looked like bits of maps. Over time I kept these aside and eventually had enough to make recognisable sections. They turned out to be cut up pages from early editions of the maps published by Bass and Flinders who made the first ever circumnavigation of Australia, or at least that’s what we thought they probably were. It seems that at some point in the libraries history surplus copies of theses maps were cut up for use as backing paper, rather in the manner much older manuscripts are found as part of the bindings of books. The original maps were of course quite valuable by the time I found their butchered copies. Every one expressed horror and regret at this past error of judgement. This was at a time a few decades ago when libraries were mostly reasonably funded. Now, with the loony barbarians in control of most english speaking societies I would hate to think what similar monstrosities are occurring.
Great blog, by the way.