way from the glory years. John the First (1805-61), like his father a jobbing engraver of exceptional ability, had begun to specialise in maps. His were quite gorgeous: the precision of his engraving on the copper sheets created maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail, far better than anything the Ordnance Survey were producing at the time. His first published map, the 1826 Directory Plan of Edinburgh, was lavish and lovely. Looking at it now, what is most remarkable is how little this monumental city has changed in nearly two centuries; aside from the markets and narrow closes cleared for the building of Waverley station, you could easily use it to steer yourself around today.
John the First’s Edinburgh was a cauldron of high artistic and scientific specialism, producing the best reference materials in the world. Out of it came not just Bartholomew’s, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Scotsman and the publishing houses of Constable and A. & C. Black. Just around the corner from John’s first works was the printing shop of brothers William and Robert (W. & R.) Chambers, later to become mighty publishers of dictionaries and other reference works. Edinburgh was a hotbed of all kinds: the Chambers brothers habitually slept under the counter of the shop, in order to fight off the regular nocturnal raiders.
The firm grew in a typically modest, rather Scottish way; steadily nonetheless. In his first year of business, John earned a total of £78 16s 6d, and by the time of his death in 1861, when John Junior took over the reins, they had about twenty employees and an annual wage bill of over a thousand pounds. John Junior, and his son, John George, combined cartographic excellence with canny business acumen; Bartholomew’s boomed. In that, it had considerable assistance from the mood of the times: maps were the hottest new property and the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for them. The explosion of the railways was chiefly responsible, from the need for lavish plans and prospectuses to be presented to government and as an incentive for investors, right through to their completion, and the public’s desire to see where these new steam beasts could take them. Each copper sheet would have to have the appropriate parts beaten out on an anvil and reengraved with the new railway, but it was worth every bit of trouble to the map-makers, for the results flew off the shelf.
Then there was the steam revolution on the seas too, necessitating maps of the growing number of commercial and military liners ploughing the oceans, as well as maps of the mystery lands now reachable from the ports of Southampton and Liverpool. The growing Empire needed mapping, while in Britain itself there was the rapidly changing electoral map of a country that was grudgingly allowing more and more people to participate, and, before long, the first leisure maps for those who wanted to pedal into the countryside of a Sunday on their trusty boneshaker. Bart’s also created new markets, particularly of world atlases, for both adults and children. As Rudyard Kipling commented in an address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1928, ‘as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and get the Atlas’. Bartholomew’s reacted to each opportunity with relish and speed, and considerable aesthetic élan.
For the firm’s trump card was not its tight-knit family fortress and sensitive ear to the ground, but the sheer poetic beauty of the maps. Simple, yet packed with information but never too crowded: everything just so (in a Morningside accent). Its most famous original feature was the use of colour shading between contours, through a spectrum of greens for the lower ground, browns for the middle, purple and finally white for the snowy peaks. Bartholomew’s did the same in the areas of sea, with bathymetric contours of ever-darker shades of blue to indicate the deepening fathoms. Although this became a common cartographic tick, no one ever did it better than the company that first introduced it in 1880, and it remained Bartholomew’s signature until the final maps limped out just over a century later. This was thanks to perhaps the greatest John, number three, John George (1860-1920), who was utterly obsessive about colour harmony, and not just on his maps. When postage rates rose from a penny to a penny halfpenny, he despised the shade of brown adopted for the new 112d stamp, and insisted on using a penny red and a halfpenny green instead.
In the nineteenth century, the cartographic establishment was a fearsome beast, and it didn’t take well to the rather dour, shy Scotsmen and their surprisingly flash commercial ways. The firm resisted takeovers and mergers, even from John George’s relative by marriage, map-maker George Philip of Liverpool. The first great map mavericks, they refused to countenance the business leaving the family, or even leaving Edinburgh. They were also notoriously poor of health, and often ascribed some of their business success to this very fact, for they believed that disabled people made the finest cartographers, if only because they were less likely to move around so much, and were thus able to maintain the extreme concentration demanded by the job.
Bartholomew’s most celebrated map—the Times Atlas excluded—was its Half Inch series, originally marketed as the Reduced Ordnance Survey, after John the Second had hammered out a deal with the government’s own map-makers and before the Copyright Act of 1911 forbade such a practice. God-fearing, sober and unable to come up with any name more exciting than John they may have been, but they weren’t averse to some fierce self-promotion, if it sold one more map. When, in the early 1890s, John George moved the company into a splendid new building by Holyrood Park, he grandly christened it the Edinburgh Geographical Institute. Less impressively, it was located on a street called the Gibbet Loan, which John George felt detracted from its address. No problem if you’re the city’s most revered map-maker, however. He simply changed it on the next map of Edinburgh to the altogether more elegant, if anodyne, Park Road, the name by which it is still known, and mapped, today.
It was through the blue Half Inch series that I was first introduced to Bartholomew’s as my map addiction flourished through the 1970s. They had a striking but slightly old-fashioned quality to them, and I quickly came to associate them with the bookshelves of elderly relatives and the smell of beeswax. I was Mr Now in my map choices, an enthusiastic consumer of the brand new metric OS sheets in their dazzling pinky-purple covers. Thanks to the soft poison of nostalgia, now that they’re no longer produced, I find Bart’s maps absolutely charming, and can admire their clarity, precision and use of colour for hours. In their heyday just prior to the First World War, they outsold the Ordnance Survey’s own Half Inch by at least ten to one, so far eclipsing them that the OS eventually killed their own series and focused instead on the one-inch scale. Bartholomew’s was outshone in its turn too, eventually. Sales started to dip badly throughout the 1970s: after all, why buy a host of separate maps, when each one costs nearly as much as a road atlas of the entire country at a scale that is only slightly less? The Bartholomew list was trimmed extensively in the 1980s, with only popular tourist areas such as the Lake District and the south-west peninsula getting updated. Even that wasn’t enough to staunch the haemorrhage of sales, however, and the whole series was quietly pensioned off at the turn of the final decade of the twentieth century.
On the international stage, Bartholomew’s finest hour came in its production of the mighty Times Atlas of the World, still regularly cited everywhere as the finest atlas available. There had been two previous editions, in 1895 and 1900, published by The Times newspaper in London, before Bartholomew’s came on board in 1920 and transformed the book into the beautiful ogre we now know and love. Even in these days of such intricate online mapping, the Times Atlas, with its enormous pages and crystal clear cartography, is more than maintaining its value, and is likely to do so long after other paper maps have been blown away.
If the Times Atlas has shouldered all global opposition out of the way by dint of its sheer heft, then the prize for pared-down elegance and practicality must go to that other great British cartographic icon. Arising from far more lowly beginnings, Harry Beck’s 1933 map of the London Underground has been emulated and impersonated all over the planet. It is a masterstroke of simplicity, stripped of all surplus information and conveying everything it needs to in the most efficient way possible. Beck realised that, once you were on the tube, your real geographical position was of no great consequence; all you
