![\"An](\"http:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/lost-map-robot-man.jpg\")
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My grandpa passed away last year, and though it wasn\u2019t Covid-19 that got him, one of the nth-order-effects of the pandemic is that I\u2019ve had loads of time to explore my grandparents\u2019 legacy. They were fervent travellers, and I recently discovered a box of old tourist maps from some of the places they visited across their lives. <\/p>\n
Tourist maps may not seem like such an interesting artefact today, but some of these were just plain lovely. Products of a pre-computer design era, and before they became cheaply-printed vehicles for advertising, they\u2019re just nice to look at.<\/p>\n
While I\u2019m sure a 45-year-old map of bus routes in Rome isn\u2019t going to have a functional purpose any more, they\u2019re still such attractive images that I\u2019ve decided to share them with the wider internet under a liberal usage license<\/a>. I think some of these images have the potential to be used in artwork in interesting ways, which is part of the reason I\u2019ve digitised them myself, in arbitrarily high resolution. <\/p>\n How high-res they are largely depends on how big the physical map was – for the bigger maps I photographed them in pieces, then did a quick stitching of them in my ancient version of Photoshop. Some of the seams aren\u2019t perfect, but that\u2019s not really why the images are there.<\/p>\n Surprisingly, this isn\u2019t anywhere near all of the maps in the collection I found, but I just picked out the ones I thought were the prettiest. I particularly like one of the maps of Venice<\/a>, a surprisingly-cheerful and hand-drawn map of Manhattan<\/a>, and how much Washington DC looks like a Sim City map<\/a>.<\/p>\n I hope whoever finds them makes something interesting with them – hopefully something better than opportunists selling overpriced prints of them on Etsy, because that would make me sad. Make something cool, internet!<\/p>\n![\"Two](\"http:\/\/www.trickartt.com\/notes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/two-map-crops.jpg\")
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