Hal Shelton manuscript map collection

"Despite the widespread years of maps, the art of mapmaking remains obscure to most people, as do the mapmakers, or cartographers, themselves. Thus, the recent gift to the Library by the H.M. Gousha Co. (a subsidiary of the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles), including twenty-nine zinc-plate maps painted by the noted artist-cartographer Hal Shelton, allows a rare glimpse into a little-known, yet most essential discipline."

"Painted over a period of almost twenty years for the Jeppesen Co. Denver, Colorado, Shelton’s maps are startlingly realistic, and beautiful, in their natural color and their representation of three-dimensional relief. Shelton arrived at his singular technique through years of experimentation with several elements: an oscillating airbrush, casein and acrylic paints, and offset-press zinc plates on which he had contour maps etched. Rejecting traditional approaches in which colors were employed arbitrarily to define landforms or altitude, Shelton sought instead to represent nature as accurate as possible by using colors closely associated with natural appearance, including some colors long sanctioned by convention—such as blue for water. While retaining an orthographically accurate position and scale for each feature, Shelton depicted landforms by shaping them distinctly through tonal changes—that is through grading from dark to light. By further employing a strict economy and harmony of design and content, Shelton succeeded in creating maps that simultaneously serve their primary role as 'instruments of communication' –as he calls them—and as aesthetically pleasing objects thus meeting the demands of both science and art."

"Originally, and consciously, designed for use by airline passengers, generally uninitiated in the complexities of technical map-reading, Shelton’s maps were soon widely adopted by pilots and schools and colleges, and were used by NASA to index photographs of the earth taken on early space missions. Indeed, Shelton’s achievement places him in the ranks of the foremost cartographers of our century who have made essays in relief representation—one of the major problems in the history of mapmaking—such as Richard Harrison, Eduard Imhof, Erwin Raisz, and Kitiro Tanaka."

"Since the Shelton maps were conceived as tools for duplication, those exhibited here still have adhered to them tape, labels, and registration markers, all essential in guiding printers in the reproduction of the maps. The same needs explain the fragmented representation of North America, in which the Aleutian Islands and sections of the contiguous continents are depicted in otherwise wasted space on the zinc plate. The published map of Nevada, moreover, shows how the original zinc-plate maps were overlaid at later stages in the printing process with geographical and cultural symbols."