Origins of Map Libraries in the mid-Nineteenth Century

I need to cut down the massively overlong chapter on traditional map history. To keep the book focused on map history, I have decided to save a few words by moving some of the contextual information about the origins of map libraries here.

Update 30 August 2021: some small edits and updates made.

Update 3 December 2022: added note re playing cards; also, I have added another blog entry re the origins of Harvard College Library’s and the Library of Congress’s map collections.

Update 12 December 2022: added more re Jomard and his work in map history.

Although individuals and institutions collected maps throughout the early modern era, and especially with the wholesale growth of the print marketplace after 1650, the organization of map collections within public libraries was very much a development of the nineteenth century. [n1] Broadly speaking, two factors led to the effort to open up libraries and archives to more than an elite few and to organize and catalog their holdings. First, the blending after ca. 1780 of the practices of early modern historians (who produced narratives of political and military events) with the erudition of antiquaries (who studied all other aspects of the past) in a new “historicism” (as historiographers call it). “History” began to refer both to the past as a whole as well as to its study. The result was Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, expressed in 1824, that the purpose of history was narrate the past wie es eigentlich gewesen, that is, “as it actually happened” or “as it essentially happened.” Second, the intensification of Europe’s imperial engagement with the rest of the world and the emergence of the new political concept of the nation-state required the active and extensive deployment of the new history to create the necessary cultural narratives of imperial justification and national community. (All this will be examined in chapter 3 of the book, currently entitled “The Synoptic Map Concept Emerges, 1780–1830.”)

The new ethos of national libraries and archives to serve as sites to create and preserve national and imperial identities generated a movement to make their holdings accessible. Catalogs of major libraries had been prepared before 1750 but were little more than short-title inventories. The libraries themselves were organized by subject, and books were to be found by walking the aisles and grazing the shelves. As libraries grew rapidly after 1780, some libraries began to keep track of holdings with slips of paper, in a practice first described in the sixteenth century. The paper slips were regularized as card catalogs in the modern sense in Vienna in about 1780. Parisian revolutionaries soon thereafter recommended the use of the unprinted backs of standard-sized playing cards so that the information could be physically handled with ease in the creation of a national book catalog. [It seems that there was a long history in France of using the back’s of playing cards for secondary purposes, such as recording the manifests of ships smuggling goods from France into Britain.] However, the card catalog remained a largely internal inventory system throughout the nineteenth century and did not displace the compiled inventory (Krajewski 2011, 27–47; see Hopkins 1992). Slips and cards were used, however, as the foundation for preparing printed catalogs that advertised each library’s holdings, often by subject. By the late nineteenth century, the extensive effort to integrate national, provincial, research, and community libraries with their respective communities of clients had underpinned the formation of librarianship as a profession.

France

The first distinct map collection within a public library was established in 1828 in the Bibliothèque royale, in Paris. The institutional descendent of the ancien régime library of the kings of France, to which a few select scholars had been admitted since 1692, the library had been transformed when the revolutionaries had seized it in 1792 and converted into a national library with a new mandate for collecting and serving the public (Priebe 1982; Oliver 2007). The new Bibliothèque nationale expanded greatly as the depository for confiscated book collections, organized by the new card catalogs. The library was renamed the Bibliothèque imperiale under Napoleon I, and then the Bibliothèque royale with the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815, but it did not lose its public-facing character.

As with other early national libraries, the Bibliothèque royale was organized by form: printed books, manuscript books, and artistic works (prints and drawings). Maps, atlases, and related books were scattered throughout these departments. But in 1828, a supportive minister sought to reward the editor of the great, multi-volume Description de l’Égypte, Edme-François Jomard, with a new, dedicated position as curator of a new department of geography. The event has been taken as the formation of a dedicated map library, although the reach of the original department encompassed general geographical and ethnographic books and materials as well (Bus 1931; Pelletier 1979; Pelletier 1987; Godlewska 1995, 115–16; Laissus 2004, 392–420, 516–18; Richard 2010, 2014; Sarazin 2016). Jomard’s first statement of map librarianship makes fascinating reading, if only for Jomard’s observation (a car-wreck of a statement from a present-day perspective) that one should break up atlases and separate maps from books so as to create regionally organized collections of sheet maps. Jomard was primarily interested in contemporary materials. He Jomard mentioned old maps only in terms of the need to organize all the maps already housed in the library into a closed ancien fond. By contrast, the fond nouveau was rapidly growing through legally mandated copyright deposits, donations, and acquisitions. Overall, the essay was dominated by Jomard’s fascination with the new practices of measuring and mapping hypsometric data, on the need to build up an ethnographic collection (Jomard 1831, 49–54; also Jomard 1848).

In addition to copyright copies of newly published works, most of Jomard’s acquisitions were of contemporary maps, which for areas beyond Europe still included the works of critical French geographers of the eighteenth century, notably Guillaume Delisle and J. B. d’Anville. He was especially interested in maps that were useful in sustaining the “spirit of discovery” (Jomard 1840, 433) and in assisting the voyagers and explorers whose expeditions he did so much to promote and coordinate (Godlewska 1995, 115–16). He was especially concerned with the promotion of new expeditions into northern Africa to establish French claims against the British (Heffernan 2001, 2014).

The jealousy of other curators towards Jomard’s preferential treatment in 1828 led the new geographical department to be subordinated to the department of prints in November 1832; it stayed there except for brief periods of autonomy in 1839 and again in 1854–58; in 1858, the map cabinet was attached to printed books, where it would henceforth remain (Laissus 2004, 516–17). Only in 1942, perhaps prompted by the transfer to the Bibliothèque nationale of the library and map collections of the impoverished Société de géographie (see Heffernan and Delano Smith 2014, 52–53), was a permanent independent map library created within the French national library.

Britain

In Britain, the Royal Geographical Society was founded in 1830 with the special aim to promote the exploration of the interior of Africa (Barnett 1998; Stern 1998). Its foundation further had the express aim of establishing “a complete collection of maps and charts from the earliest period of rude geographical delineations to the most improved of the present time” (quoted by Crone and Day 1960, 12). This was very much an aspiration, however, as the society’s finances precluded the actual acquisition of many maps. Even after the RGS began in 1854 to receive government funding to enlarge its map collections and to hire a map curator, most acquisitions of historical materials were by donation (Clark 1986).

The formation of the RGS in part influenced the British Museum to show an interest in curating early maps. It certainly had a substantial number of maps in the antiquarian collections that had been brought together to create the museum in 1753, and these had been substantially augmented by the 1823 gift of the private library of the map-made George III by his son, George IV (Barber 2003; Barber 2005). The keeper of manuscripts and his assistant now undertook a catalog of manuscript maps (Madden and Holmes 1844) and in 1844 the museum appointed R. H. Major as the first assistant librarian with particular responsibility for printed maps; a general administrative reorganization led in 1867 to Major’s appointment as keeper of a newly formed, separate department of maps (Harris 1998, 74, 116, 127–41, 203, 254, 266, and 280; see Greenough 1840, lxxx; Campbell 1996, 122–33).

USA

See also later blog post.

In the USA, the political infrastructure generated the usual institutional complexities. The private libraries formed by colonial legislatures were variously recast after 1816 as state libraries (e.g., Shaw 2013), although the limited character of the early federal government meant that the Library of Congress would not be transformed de facto into the national library until well after the Civil War (Cole 1971; Ostrowski 2004, esp. 145–78). The federal government lacked a map archive; its diplomats had to borrow maps from Harvard College for use in the 1842 negotiations with Britain over the US-Canadian boundary (Elkins 1952). The college’s map collections had been greatly enhanced by its 1818 acquisition of the ca. 5,000 maps collected by the Hamburg geographer, Christoph Ebeling; the collection was bought and donated to the college by Israel Thorndike, a Boston merchant who traded both enslaved peoples and the commodities they produced (Denis et al. 2018, 8–15). Even so, the college lacked a coherent program to collect maps and a separate map library was not organized until much later. In New York, the ongoing expansion of the USA across the North American continent, wrapped up in the ideology of manifest destiny, led to the formation of the American Geographical Society in New York in 1851; as with the Royal Geographical Society, the new society’s founders intended to build a separate map library, which was initiated with the acquisition of twelve maps in 1852 (Mullins 1966).

The lack of an official repository for the mapping of the burgeoning US empire led to calls in the 1850s for the formation of a geographical department within the Library of Congress, or by implication within the Smithsonian Institution, founded in 1846. The German geographer, travel writer, and historian of discovery Johann Georg Kohl pitched the idea of a national map library in an address to the institution in 1856 (Kohl 1857). Although these calls institutionally came to nothing, they did establish within the ante-bellum intellectual community a broader sense of the worth of maps (Stephenson 1989). [n2] The Library of Congress did acquire in 1867 the collection of the nationalist documentary historian Peter Force, a collection that included 1,200 maps and views that had been collected as historical documents (Stephenson 1973). But it would not be until 1897, not coincidentally just as the USA was entering a new phase of global imperialism, that a separate map division was created in the newly opened library building, under the superintendence of the bibliographer P. Lee Phillips (Wolter et al. 1979; Seavey 1993; Stephenson 1998). In addition to uniting maps from around the library’s various collections in one location, Phillips soon produced chronologically arranged bibliographies of the maps and geographical accounts of the USA’s new colonies (Phillips 1898; Phillips 1903) and its new imperial sphere of the Americas (e.g., Phillips 1902).

Notes

The image in the blog roll is from Wikipedia, showing part of the old spaces of the Library of Congress map and geography division.

n1. The small and rather dated literature on the emergence, growth, and articulation of professional map librarianship as a specific subset of librarianship more generally is heavily oriented to the twentieth century (Ristow 1967; Wolter 1973; Wolter 1975, 78–94).

n2. I am indebted in this section to the insights of Susan Schulten.

References

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