Cartographic Ephemera and American Travel Mapping

Abstract The ephemeral maps that are discussed in this article include those found in promotional brochures and handbills, on postcards, souvenirs, placemats, and hotel stationery. They include the maps of local streets and roads handed out at car rental and real estate agencies, maps on timetables and transportation tickets, and in airline magazines. The types and formats of these objects are almost unlimited, and their numbers are prodigious. Ephemeral maps, like ephemera in general struggle for a place among the established classes of formats—books, prints, manuscripts, archives, broadsheets, pamphlets, and yes, maps among them—that professional librarians use in catalog descriptions and finding aids. It is hard in practice to delineate the boundary between a map and a brochure as formats; perhaps we shouldn’t try. In an effort to support informed choices, this paper offers a classification of ephemeral travel mapping before concluding with a case for its retention (wherever practical).