Old Map of Northern Europe in 1967 by the Polish Army Topography Service - Scandinavia, British Isles, Iceland, Baltic Sea

Not every old map on this site was produced for sale to travellers or collectors; this sheet was drawn in 1967 by the Polish Army Topography Service, one of the Warsaw Pact military mapping agencies that spent the Cold War compiling detailed topographic surveys of Western Europe for strategic use, work that has only become widely known to historians and collectors in recent decades. Drawn on a Mercator projection, the sheet covers the United Kingdom and Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, extending east across the Baltic states as far as Leningrad and south to Hamburg.

Physical features are picked out in careful detail, with mountain ranges, river systems and coastlines rendered alongside political boundaries, while the North Sea and Baltic Sea are shown in full alongside the shipping routes that crossed them. Iceland sits isolated in the map's northwest corner, and the British Isles appear at a scale fine enough to show individual towns, drawn by cartographers working from sources their own governments were never meant to publish in this much detail.

Now valued as a document of Cold War cartography rather than as a working military chart, it makes an unusual gift for a history buff or anyone drawn to Cold War-era design. It is reproduced unframed at high resolution and available in a full range of sizes.