“American Maps are Bad” -Jacques Redway

I came across the name Jacques Redway while researching James Monteith, and noticing a lot of similarities in the style and content of their geography textbooks. Monteith was older, more prolific, and started his geography career much earlier than Redway, but Redway’s work is very intriguing. His Butler’s Complete Geography has some great maps.

What really got my attention was this short piece from the New York Times in August 1892. I think Redway is even more right now than he was then, as the atlases and geography textbooks that cartographers like him and Monteith produced in the nineteenth century were, in many ways, more inventive and compelling than most today.

The original Redway article, which has a lot of detail on map projections, is available through The Internet Archive here.

Newspaper article