United States Map 1967 Regional Print - New York, Los Angeles, Chicago

This map of the United States comes from the Pergamon World Atlas, published in 1967 by Pergamon Press in collaboration with the Polish Army Topography Service and printed at the Wojskowe Zaklady Kartograficzne works in Warsaw, an English-language edition of the larger Polish Atlas Swiata praised for weighing nearly five and a half kilograms and packing in over four hundred thematic maps. The sheet is distinguished by its liberal but restrained use of tinted color, with beige lowlands, blue water, and red highlighted transport routes laid over a beige-toned page designed to sit flat despite the atlas's heavy fold-out binding. It covers the full continental United States on a single detailed spread, and it was compiled at the height of the Cold War, when an East-West publishing partnership between a British scientific press and a Polish state cartographic service was itself a notable act of collaboration across the Iron Curtain.

The Rocky Mountains are picked out in warmer tones to mark their elevation, while the Mississippi and Missouri rivers and the Great Lakes are rendered with the same careful bathymetric shading the atlas used for oceans worldwide. New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are labeled among the country's major urban centers, and an extensive network of roads and railways is traced connecting them, reflecting the atlas's stated aim of documenting global infrastructure as much as physical geography. The map's symbol-rich legend allows dense information to be read at a glance despite the modest scale. Taken together, the sheet gives a precise, mid-century snapshot of a nation at the peak of its interstate highway buildout.

This page suits a collector especially interested in Cold War-era publishing history, since a Pergamon-Polish joint production of an American map is a genuinely unusual pairing of West and East in one object. It also makes an appealing choice for anyone who wants a crisp mid-century view of the country rather than a Victorian one. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.