Origins of the Exhibition
In about 2000, Harold L. Osher MD (1924–2023) offhandedly observed that he really liked nineteenth-century chromolithographs and thought that the subject would make a great exhibition. Dr. Osher’s suggestion came to mind when Matthew Edney, Osher Professor in the History of Cartography, was writing the preface to the published catalog of Diana Lange and Benjamin van der Linde’s 2021–22 exhibition in Hamburg: Farbe trifft Landkarte / Colour Meets Map. He therefore proposed an exhibition on chromolithographic maps as a way to mark Dr. Osher’s 100th birthday in January 2024. To prepare the exhibition, he relied extensively on the pioneering insights about the history of map printing offered by his doctoral advisor, Prof. David Woodward (1942–2004), who was a founding member of OML’s Board of Review. He therefore dedicated the exhibition to both Dr. Osher and Prof. Woodward.
Acknowledgments
A Pageant of Spectacles would not have been possible without the generous donations by many individuals of maps and books to the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. We are grateful to the Osher Map Library Foundation for an annual acquisitions budget that has facilitated the recent purchases of many chromolithographs new to our collections and included in the exhibition.
Dr. Libby Bischof, OML Executive Director, supported the exhibition’s development. She and Kelsey Riordan, along with Renee Keul, reviewed, formatted, and printed the labels. Adinah Barnett, David Neikirk, and Nora Ibrahim digitized all items in the exhibition. Dr. Edney would also like to thank the entirety of the OML staff, as well as our work study students and interns, for their ongoing support during the research, organization, and mounting of the exhibition. He must also thank Damir Porobic of USM’s art department for many student-driven conversations about maps, printing, and color.
Mounting an exhibition of this size with quite disparate objects would not have been possible without the skills and tremendous efforts of our preparator, Kevin Callahan, and the Kimball Street Studios team. We are deeply indebted to them.
Tom Touchton and the Tampa Bay History Center gave the impetus for Prof. Edney’s opening lecture and therefore for the interpretive essay offered here, by inviting him to deliver the annual Nell Ward Lecture for the Touchton Map Library at TBHC on 2 November 2023. A video of that lecture is available at on their YouTube page.
This online version of the exhibition was created by Paul Fuller, Coordinator of Digital Collections and Digital Initiatives at OML, using Quire, an open-source publishing tool created by Getty.