09 March 2011

"You are here"

Subtitled "Personal geographies and othermaps of the imagination", this book by Katherine Harmon is rich in cartographic diversity.
Back cover art - Through the 1940s Dell Book built highly successful line of genre fiction paperbacks by incorporating maps on the books' back covers, depicting a central location from each plot line - 552 in all -
Doggy whimsy - including a placemat from Bob Murray's Doghouse restaurant, Seattle; Neera Tetreault's "Cyrus's Squirrel Map of Spring Creek, Noting All the Choicest Hang-Outs of Those Elusive Critters, the Chasing of Which Gives Such Meaning to Life"; and John Held, Jr's "A Dog's Idea of the Ideal Country Estate" (1920s) -
Edwin Morgan's "Chaffinch Map of Scotland" 1965 (showing the geographic range of various Scottish names for the bird) and Nina Katchadourian's "Austria" 1997 (connecting the geographical and anatomical) -
Ellsworth Kelly's "Fields on a Map (Meschers, Gironde)" 1950 - one of the works in which he began to develop his reduced geometric forms - and a navigation chart from the Marshall Islands -
Along with the amazing John Held Jr, other names of note include Guillermo Kuitca, Ernest Dudley Chase, Sharon Horvath, Joyce Kozloff.

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