THE MAP BUSINESS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20040, 12 September 1939, Page 2

THE MAP BUSINESS

RUINED BY HITLER THE UNSTABLE FRONTIERS The map-makers have their own special grievance against Adolf Hitler, writes Anne O'Hare McCormick in the New York Times. He has shot the map business to pieces. One might have supposed that a man who pushes frontiers about every few months would keep the map publishers happily busy, but the contrary seems to be the case. The reason it is difficult to find an up-to-date map of Europe is not that the publishers cannot print new maps as fast as Hitler changes them. It is because they have no confidence in present boundaries.

“If we got out a map indicating the peculiar status of Slovakia and Bohemia, how long would it be good?” asked the head salesman at the headquarters of a well-known map publisher. “The maps we issued last year are already obsolete. Until there is some assurance that new frontiers will stay put, we cannot publish maps and people will not buy thorn.”

Cartographers in fact are strong supporters of the status quo. A few have ceded to Hitler the Sudetenland, but the majority still refuse to follow the Nazi march beyond Austria. Premier Mussolini they bore with as far as Ethiopia, which was merged with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland by a slight change of colour, but they do not yet recognise the conquest of Albania. They don’t like Mussolini much better than Hitler, and even Robert Moses (New York Park Commissioner) is a trial. “As long as the Park Commissioner is metamorphosing the metropolitan area and revising the contours of the arterial system of Manhattan Island, we can’t publish a reliable map of New York,” complains the salesman quoted above.

Prophetic Maps

Changing a map is not a simple matter of extending or bending boundaries or changing the shape and colour of this region or that. It means altering the names of towns, rivers, and lakes, shuffling provinces, re-routing railways, making fresh surveys, and prodding frontier commissions. Dislocations following revision show up as clearly, if less poignantly, on a map as they do on the ground. Such new maps as are available look sketchy and tentative. Or they go too far in forecasting the future.

One small map of Germany and Hungary designed as an insert for a standard atlas is coloured and marked to suggest that Great Germany already stretches from the Netherlands to the R'umanian frontier. This prophetic picture ignores the passionate nalionalism of the Hungarians, but is. hardly more startling than a comparison of the latest maps six months old with present realities. During a period too brief to be recorded in geographies four countries besides Germany have increased their territory—Poland, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. New frontiers have been drawn between Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Britis'h Somaliland. Nobody knows how far borders have shifted under the hammering of Soviet and Japanese forces in Mongolia and in Korea, nor what fluctuations occur in the thin, precarious line Japan trios to hold around the unconquered bulk of China.