AIRLINE MAPS: A Century of Art and Design

Cartography, civil aviation, graphic design, marketing and world events collide in this visual feast. Here are sumptuous Art Deco posters, intricate artistry, bold modernism, 1960s psychedelia, clever photography and even subway map-style diagrams in a celebration of 100 years of international passenger flight. Passenger aviation and regular international routes were established in 1919 and the book opens with two contrasting cartographic themes and beautiful, detailed pictorial maps rubbing shoulders with simplified diagrams embellished with eye-catching graphics as we fly to France, Espagne and Maroc from Toulouse in the north, across Gibraltar to Casablanca, from Venezia to Vienna, Imperial Airways' Paris to London map, posters for the Western Air Express, Pan American (Makes the world smaller), Egyptian Airlines, and Sabena, the Belgian airline which ran the London to Scandinavia route and the Baltic Air Express with a 1930 poster including a handy compass overlayed on London's Tower Bridge. There are stunning double page maps, page after page of colourful posters enticing us to exotic lands, exquisitely detailed world maps decorated with hot air balloons, fragile plywood aircraft, all manner of flying machines and ships and whales in the border decorations. Through each decade we are taken on routes around Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan and India to the wide-bodied world as we fly the Orient Express, Philippine Airlines into the era of the jet aircraft of the late 60s and a wonderful schematic of Aeroflot Soviet Airlines spreading its wings both East to Tokyo and Djakarta to New York in the West. The book concludes with 2000-2019, the rise of the low cost airline to low orbit and many high quality and innovative designs like the 2011 map for Spanair which is a thing of beauty. 144 very large pages 27.7 x 24cm, Penguin paperback, colour.
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