Airline Maps by Mark Ovenden

Author:Mark Ovenden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141993119
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

There are many other graphical clues pointing toward a desire to expand the market for air travel. The continuing rise of magazine advertisements signals this (pp. 50, 65–67, 74–75), and several depictions of people in far-off lands seem intended to suggest that friendly natives will be delighted to greet nervous travelers (pp. 50, 65, 68). Not surprisingly, given the recent war, military precision of operations also becomes a theme (pp. 66, 74–75), again perhaps to reassure would-be travelers that aircraft operations are rigorously organized. This era was also an all-too-short-lived golden age for commercial artistry, beautifully drawn and colored-in machines and people grace in which lowly mass-market publications. Elsewhere, more creative approaches to design display an abstract playfulness, folding, slicing, and reshaping the globe in entertaining ways (pp. 54–55, 63–65), although placing the landscape underneath a boot is probably an unfortunate choice (p. 71). There is also a brasher, more colorful style emerging, which points toward the 1960s (p. 73).

Abstract diagrams were first seen in the 1930s, in tune with modernism’s principle of fit-for-purpose simplicity alongside avoidance of unnecessary embellishment (pp. 35–37). Diagrams also make further appearances in this era, with landscapes stripped away, leaving just the simplest of depictions (pp. 63, 64, 69, 70, 76). However, these are isolated examples and, similarly for transit maps showing urban rail networks, schematized representations did not become commonplace until the 1960s. With such a range of cartography, 1946 to 1957 was certainly a golden age for variety in the world of airline maps.

ALL ON THIS SPREAD: A fun quirk of some publicity around airline cartography is what the authors describe as “giant people pointing at maps” or perhaps “Bond villains planning world domination.” These examples include a late 1940s Canadian Pacific Airlines poster (TOP LEFT) with a gargantuan stewardess about to bowl the Earth down some galactic alley; a 1952 magazine ad from United Air Lines (TOP RIGHT)—foreseeing the look of some twenty-first-century plane-spotting apps, or planning some Machiavellian air raid on Middle America? Then there is a stunningly imagined map wall from a 1955 Lockheed press ad (BOTTOM) showing the huge number of air routes across the planet that use its aircraft, while the decorator balances on a slightly precarious-looking stepladder.

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