Book competition

This week’s competition prize is ‘Picturing America: the Golden Age of Pictorial Maps’ by Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Chicago Press/Library of Congress). Click here for your chance to win.

Pictorial maps have been used and admired since the first medieval cartographer put pen to paper depicting mountains and trees across countries, people and objects around margins, and sea monsters in oceans. In the United States, the art form flourished from the 1920s through the 1970s, when thousands of innovative maps were mass-produced for use as advertisements and decorative objects – the golden age of American pictorial maps.

Picturing America is the first book to showcase this vivid and popular genre of maps. Geographer Stephen J. Hornsby gathers together 158 delightful pictorial jewels, most drawn from the extensive collections of the Library of Congress. Organised into six thematic sections, Picturing America covers a vast swathe of the pictorial map tradition during its golden age, ranging from ‘Maps to Amuse’ to ‘Maps for War’. Hornsby has unearthed the most fascinating and visually striking maps the United States has to offer: Disney cartoon maps, college campus maps, kooky state tourism ads, Second World War promotional posters, and many more. This remarkable volume’s glorious full­-colour pictorial maps will be irresistible to any map lover or armchair traveller.

For your chance to win simply answer the following question and submit your details here before midday on 26 May.

Q: Which two explorers led the 1804–06 expedition to map the territory of the Louisiana Purchase?

For our last competition we offered Genre Paintings in the Mauritshuis, edited by Maud Lankester and Yvette Bruijnen (Mauritshuis/Waanders Publishers).

Q: Which 17th-century Flemish still-life painter was the subject of the Prado’s first ever exhibition devoted to a woman artist last year?

A: Clara Peeters.

Congratulations to the winner, John Cleary