A very handsome map of transportation services in the greater Kansas City area from 1941. A nicely subdued olive street grid is overlaid by the route lines – colour-coded by mode (black for streetcars, blue and red for bus lines, and a lovely aqua for trolleybuses). Areas of interest are called out in bright yellow, so this looks like a six-colour print job – quite a luxury in 1941! There’s also a great downtown inset, […]
Here’s something of an increasing rarity – a London Underground map that I haven’t seen before. It’s the 1941 edition of the Hans Schleger map, printed in brown and blue ink only due to wartime austerity measures. I’ve written about the first edition of this map previously (April 2014, 3 stars) which was notable for its use of a blue airbrushed effect to highlight the central part of the map. Its removal certainly improves the legibility […]
Here’s a very handsome map of transit in 1941 Montreal, provided by the Montreal Tramways Company, or La Compagnie des Tramways de Montreal. Despite the name, there’s also a healthy (and growing) number of bus routes on this map, shown in blue. Cleverly, the map rotates the city away from true north in order to fit everything onto the sheet of paper allocated, and the north pointer used is simply lovely, even including the company’s […]
Here’s another beautiful vintage transit map, this time from Winnipeg, Canada. It’s around the same age as this great map from Portland, Oregon, and displays a similarly austere wartime aesthetic. The map is printed in just three colours (black, red and green) and – apart from some of the typography in the legend – is entirely hand-drawn and lettered. Important buildings and points of interest are all carefully and charmingly rendered, but the real winners […]
