May 12th, 2018: Ribbon Map

[xoxoxoBruce]

You want to send Aunt Ditzy to Grandma’s house so you draw her a map.
Are to going to draw all the wrong ways to go? Hell no, only the right way to go.
That’s the idea behind the Ribbon or Strip map.

Ribbon maps arose from oral or written itineraries, and were used by ancient Romans who wanted to plan trips to nearby towns, and medieval Europeans who hoped to make pilgrimages from London to Jerusalem. Reading one is like getting directions from a friend: left at this landmark, right at that fork.

By the 1860s, a pair of St. Louis-based entrepreneurs had decided there was a market for a river map that embraced its true length. In 1866, Myron Coloney and Sidney B. Fairchild, a.k.a. Coloney and Fairchild, unfurled their first Ribbon Map, a long, blue-inked facsimile of the Mississippi. “Coloney and Fairchild’s patented apparatus required that the single sheet be cut into strips, attached end-to-end, mounted on linen, and then rolled inside a wooden, metal, or paper spool,” writes art historian Nenette Luarca-Shoaf in an article in Common-place. (“This patent is for the ‘IDEA,’” the pair specified when filing it.)

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