France & Corsica Map 1955 Atlas Print - Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Ajaccio

John Bartholomew's Geographical Institute in Edinburgh edited this map of France for The Times Atlas of the World, Mid-Century Edition, which Houghton Mifflin published in Boston with John Bartholomew & Son of London; the atlas ran to five volumes between 1955 and 1959, with 122 colored double-page sheets and an index of over 200,000 names. William Clowes & Son printed the sheet in full color at 61 by 49 centimeters, with relief in gradient tints and spot heights, sea depths in tints with soundings, and roads and railways in red, and it carries an inset of Corsica at 1:1,000,000 beside the mainland at 1:2,500,000. It records France in 1955, in the last years of the Fourth Republic, a year after the Geneva accords ended the war in Indochina and the Algerian war had just begun.

The mainland sheet shows the pattern of French roads and railways in red, radiating from Paris as they had for a century, with the great rivers and coasts drawn in the same careful tints. The prime meridian is Greenwich, which marks the sheet as British work made for English-speaking readers. Corsica sits at a larger scale in its own inset, a mountainous island whose capital Ajaccio is the birthplace of Napoleon. In the south the Rhône carries its traffic from Lyon to the Mediterranean ports around Marseille, and in the west the Garonne links Toulouse and Bordeaux. The sheet shows a country in the middle of postwar reconstruction.

A mid-century design enthusiast, a traveler who drove the French roads of the 1950s, or a family from Corsica or Lyon will find a fitting gift here, perhaps for an anniversary. TheMapVault's other postwar France sheet is the Polish-made Pergamon map of 1964, drawn in graded tints with four insets, whereas this Bartholomew sheet is the British view, in English, with a single Corsica inset and the Greenwich meridian, and it belongs to the older Times Atlas tradition. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.