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Pictorial Tourist Map of Manhattan New York City

  • 1925
  • Joseph B Platt
  • 38 x 30 inches ~ (96 x 76 cm)
  • Sold. Inquire About This Poster Add to Wishlist
  • A Map of New York which is Published by the Washington Square Bookshop. Here is a map to give you pleasure, a town reduced to your mantel's measure, city of gaiety, city of gold, your Bagdad on Hudson, three hundred years old. Washington Square Bookshop. New York. 1925.

    A vibrant bird's eye view of New York City humorously designed by Joseph B. Platt, with Battery Park in the lower right corner and Grant’s Tomb and the Polo Grounds in the upper left.

    Incredibly rare map published to celebrate the tri-centenary of the purchase of Manhattan by the Dutch ("Little Miss New York Born 1626" reads a banner flying from the small plane to the right of the central compass rose) is quite extraordinarily modernist in character. It employs some of the graphic features of the new style of "wonder map" developed by MacDonald Gill in his London Underground map posters of the early teens and twenties, notably the "speech balloons" with comic quips explicating the city history and contemporary character and also in its decorative border with text of civic pride. Examples of the quips: "Is this map to be formal or informal?"; a couple looking at the Woolworth Building exclaim "Oh Boy! That's some stack of dimes.”

    WorldCat lists a single library holding for this map, at Brown University; another copyis at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center (Boston Public Library).

    Included is the original envelope the poster was sold in. “Complete in this envelope Price - One Dollar and One Half"

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