Holding the World in Your Hands: Maps in Books

Visit Ohio Dominican University Library's book exhibition, "Holding the World in Your Hands: Maps in Books," in the display cases on the bottom floor of Spangler!

Maps are a fascinating method of understanding geography and history! They can be colorful, plain, detailed, artistic, and specialized. As a primary source of information, they are concrete perceptions of a contemporary world, or of a world of a different time. Maps incorporate image with text in a way that pushed early publishers to invent alternative methods of printing. Some maps are created to be only ephemeral, or temporary in nature, while others are meant to be kept indefinitely.

Over time, many antique maps have been lost due to their fragility (think of the stereotypical brown, tattered map leading to buried treasure!), but others survived because they were supplemental to books, which tend not to be discarded. Sadly, sometimes old books are disbound by present-day dealers who see the possibility of a greater profit by selling maps individually rather than as a whole volume. By studying these examples of maps bound or housed in books, we can see different types of printing techniques as well as a snapshot of the world of the past.