The Man Who Mapped America

The Panoramic Maps collection is one of the most popular set of maps held in the Geography and Map Division, and the appeal of these maps is not hard to decipher. As described previously here in Worlds Revealed, the panoramic maps are stunning “bird’s-eye view” illustrations of towns and cities across the U.S. and Canada, largely created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Numerous illustrators and cartographers had a hand in producing these works of art over the course of decades, but in exploring the work of a single artist, Augustus Koch, we can appreciate Koch’s particular talents as well as celebrate the maps of this collection as touchstones of civic pride.