We place ourselves and others. Here. There. Across a divide. Happy together. Those who love cats – those who abhor them. Those who find wonder in puppets – and those who recoil from them.

Maps mark another division: those who use maps – and those who delight in them.

Maps in Special Collections are distinct from those in other campus libraries because of their age or significance. Like our interests, Special Collections maps are diverse, but most deal with the Southwest, Arizona, or Mexico, and range from the early sixteenth century to the early twenty-first century.

With few exceptions, our maps are cataloged individually or as parts of a related series, or they appear in manuscript collections. For the former, the online catalog has a handy division in its Advanced Search which allows a user to limit by format. With the format limit set to “maps” – and the location limit set to Special Collections – we find 1858 maps in our collection.* Not all maps are cataloged. Many libraries and archives have some uncataloged maps; some choose to organize theirs by other means. Special Collections has a fraction of its maps not yet in the online catalog. Most have been assigned call numbers and shelved. Our librarians can help you explore these maps, if a particular call number interests you.

Our maps take most every form. They vary in scale, projection, subject matter, and theme. Whether or not an item is a map is sometimes a point of debate: Is a map on a cocktail napkin a map? Or a map on a paper restaurant placemat? Can a watercolor painting be a map, like the work we identify as Mapa del Cerro de Barrabás donde se fortificó Don Vicente Guerrero después de retirarse de Zacatula, Mayo 1819. Are some maps too beautiful to be maps?

Maps represent place, but also cultural ideas and political agendas. Maps abstract our world and experiences, or depict information spatially to better understand it. Maps reflect choices and assumptions. Why is north at the top of so many maps? Does our planet have a “top” and a “bottom”? And why four cardinal directions? Maps orient us. They may show us how to get from one point to another – or what we might expect to experience from departure to destination. Conventions change. Elevation represented by hachures (sometimes referred to as “caterpillars”) was supplanted by contour lines. Maps also evidence technological change: “bird’s eye” maps gave way to “aeroplane” maps in the early years of motorized flight, and later maps used aerial photography and satellites to capture space.

Maps in manuscript collections may reflect lives of individuals working as engineers, surveyors, or real estate speculators. The Fred A. Riecker Papers (MS 493) reflects all three endeavors, including the work of his father, Paul Riecker, who created one of the earliest maps of territorial Arizona; Fred Riecker’s own surveys and maps; and plats of his Tucson real estate interests, including the subdivision knows as Riecker’s Addition. Maps are integral to the study of land, as with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service’s Land Management Survey, Navajo Indian Reservation Reports, 1930-1938 (AZ 124), tied to controversial efforts to curb erosion through grazing limits. In other instances, maps help us to understand a collection, such as hand-drawn maps essential to identify demolished downtown Tucson buildings (see the Arizona, Southwestern and Borderlands Photograph Collection, s.v. Tucson [Ariz.] -- Urban Renewal).

Special Collections also maintains a cartographic literature, including works for the cartographic history for Arizona, the Southwest, and the West. A growing literature looks at the power of maps to shape our thoughts and actions, including seminal work by the late Brian Harley, which is available at the Main Library and Special Collections.

And, finally, because maps are visual, the earliest digital collections often included them. Aficionados might find interest in the University of Texas online map collection, David Rumsey’s online collection, maps accessible via the Library of Congress, or the U.S. Geological Survey’s historical collection of topographic maps.

Come to Special Collections. See our maps. Find yourself.

We’ll show you how to get there.

-Wendel Cox

*Try a null search. If you want to find everything within the scope of a search set exclusively by limits, don’t leave the search fields blank. Instead, use an asterisk (*) to perform a search for all things within the otherwise delimited search.