Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Exhibitions

Treasured Maps: Celebrating The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division

From September 9, 2005 through May 14, 2006
Edna Barnes Salomon Room (Third Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788 (directions)

Interview with Curator Alice Hudson

Established in 1898 as a separate collection of The New York Public Library, and named a Division in 1947, the Map Division is a treasure-filled place, with maps and atlases dating from the 16th century to the present. This exhibition celebrates the Map Division's reopening in December 2005 after months of renovation. The last public reading room to be renovated, the Map Division will double its reader capacity and services with its new look. With the use of compact shelving, remote storage and Internet resources, the Map Division will open up its former stack area for digital mapping and long term research projects based in the map and atlas collections.

Treasured Maps travels from the "macro" universe of stars and constellations to the very "micro" world of a single block in lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center site. Beginning with lovely evocative constellation charts, and moving to world maps, we travel from the heavens to our earthly home. We move then from the "old worlds" of Asia and Africa toward Europe and then to North America, ending up here at home in New York City. We move from maps with the very least detail, to maps of extraordinary depth of detail, outlining the very buildings and streets so familiar to us in memory and experience.

The strongest group of antiquarian maps are those from the 17th-century reign of the Dutch as world leaders. Blaeu, Visscher, Goos, Doncker and Colom, are all notable Dutch mapmakers represented in the exhibition. Several volumes from the vellum-bound, gold-stamped Willem Blaeu atlases, covering the world, are highlights of the show, with their elegant engraved copperplate maps, enhanced with contemporary 17th-century hand coloring, decorative cartouches, and mileage markers. Costumes of the "locals" are often shown, making each map a visual statement of the local technology, ethnology, economy, and anthropology.

Two gift collections to The New York Public Library are represented in the exhibition, illustrating the enhancement to our legacy collections that such gift maps bring to the Library. We are pleased to show selected maps from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection and the John H. Levine Bequest.

Press Release

Exhibition Brochure (PDF - 7.8 MB)