This is the first year of Colton’s map publishing business. Ristow says that Colton published his first map in 1833, Burr’s map of New York State; this U.S. map must be as early. The graphic style is similar to Burr’s Universal Atlas maps, engraved the following year. With six detailed and elegant inset maps showing the environs of Albany, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Baltimore & Washington; plus a small inset map of South Part of Florida. Outline color, folded into dark teal leather covers 13.5x8 with “Burr’s Map of the United States Published By J.H. Colton & Co. New York” and a decorative border stamped in gilt. Prime meridians: Greenwich and Washington.

About this collection:

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s.

Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 21,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways. (About)

Previously on Skandalon

About The Burt Britton Collection of artists’ self-portraits:

Picking up a bartending shift at the Village Vanguard, the famous New York jazz joint where he usually worked the door, Burt Britton found himself alone at last-call with just one final patron, Norman Mailer. After pouring the esteemed author a final drink, the question was put to Burt, “What do you want from me, Kid?” Exasperated at the end of the long shift, Burt inexplicably responded, “draw me your self-portrait,” handed him a piece of folded paper, and that, simply put, is how it all began.

That night in the mid-Sixties Mailer produced and gave to Britton an amazing object of self-expression, the first of hundreds to come, a self-portrait of the author more revealing than 1000 words. Inspired by Mailer’s product, Britton started to collect. Still at the Vanguard, he gathered self-portraits by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock after landmark 1966 concerts, he even got a portrait from a New York high-school basketball phenomenon, Lew Alcindor, later the champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Moving to the legendary Strand bookstore in about 1968, Britton encountered novelists, poets, journalists, and critics, both the highly regarded and those just starting out. He would respectfully ask local and visiting literary luminaries such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Jorge Luis Borges to add their self-portrait to his album with the same democratic spirit that he offered the young John Irving, just months away from the fame that came with The World According to Garp. (Bloomsbury’s auction catalogue : PDF)

Bloomsbury’s catalogue contains every items in the Burt Britton Collection along with details and explanations about the Collection in general and some specific explanations about each self-portrait as well. Alternatively, one can browse the collection over at the Bloomsbury Auctions official website. Back in 2009, there was a story about this collection in The New York Times: “Self-Portraits Speak More Than Words” by James Barron, September 23th, 2009.

Previously on Skandalon : Don DeLillo

The magazines’s regular features included phrases such as “the working mother is still on trial,” or “drink your way down the scale with four liquid meals a day,” 2 or “sometimes a secretary’s social life is so exhausting that her job become a mere meal ticket.” I could go on all day like this – there is easily enough material here for a grad seminar in post-Eisenhower gender roles or feminist epistemology. Or perhaps enough material for an episode of Mad Men. (more)

About Codex xcix:

Codex xcix’s an occasionally updated weblog about the history of the visual arts and graphic design. Mostly this means books and their typography and illustration, maps, periodicals, photos and posters as well as other miscellaneous ephemera. The history of visual arts is a rather wide swath to cover and the selection of materials follows the Stewartian argument of “I’ll know it when I see it.” The site is embellished wherever possible with diagrams, drawings, illustrations, maps, photographs, etc., and nearly all of the images in the posts link to a much larger image. (more)

Jules et Jim, François Truffaut, 1962

• I found the photo in sterile’s photostream on Flickr (click for hi-res).
• There’s a virtual exposition about the film at the Bibliothèque du Film (Cinémathèque Française). In French.
• An essay in English about Jules et Jim by John Powers hosted by The Criterion Collection website.
• Another essay, this time by Dudley Andrew over at Film Reference (in English).
• Technical information about the film in French (Cinémathèque Française).

“Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Rouen, September 14, 1757 – 28 March 1826) was a French draughtsman and architect. […] He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some of them are pornographic and are kept in the Enfer of the library.” (wikipedia)

More drawings at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

“The Digest, also known as the Pandects (Lat. Digesta seu Pandectae, adapted from Gr. πανδέκτης pandektes, “all-containing”), is a name given to a compendium or digest of Roman law compiled by order of the emperor Justinian I in the 6th century (A.D. 530-533). The Digest was one part of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the body of civil law issued under Justinian I. The other two parts were Institutiones, and the Codex Constitutionum. A fourth part, the Novels (or “Novellae Constitutiones”), was added later.” (more)

Browse the English translation by Alan Watson on Google Books. More about this translation on the editor’s website. Download the volume one in another translation by Charles Henrey Monro. A partial French translation is also available online. And of course, the whole text is available in Latin.

About Lapham’s Quarterly:

“Each issue of Lapham’s Quarterly adopts and explores a single theme. Our first four issues were dedicated, respectively, to War, Money, Nature, and Education, each created with an aim to help readers find historical threads from Homer to Queen Elizabeth I to George Patton, from Aesop to Edith Wharton to Joan Didion. New essays from writers such as Stanley Fish, Fritz Stern, and Andrew Delbanco then knotted each theme together. A typical issue features an introductory Preamble from Editor Lewis H. Lapham; approximately 100 “Voices in Time” — that is, appropriately themed selections drawn from the annals and archives of the past — and newly commissioned commentary and criticism from today’s preeminent scholars and writers.” (more)

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.

“Welcome to the Comic Blog Elite toplist, a resource for fans, creators, retailers, and publishers to identify the very best comic blogs on the net — based on actual site hits”

The Comic Blog Elite is moderated by Matt Bergin from Division 18:

“Matt has been making comics all his life… but mostly in crayon on construction paper, and later in the margins of notebooks when he should’ve been studying. Eventually, Matt started working as an editor in the health communications industry (fun!), but managed to squeeze in time during the 9 to 5 grind to work on his comics, make more talented friends, and, ultimately, make comics with those more talented friends. He was even able to fit in contributing to the comics website PopCultureShock.com, where he hooked up with the Silent Devil crew. Thus, through blatant professional misconduct, Division 18 and a genuine comics career were born.”(more)

Meatpaper

“Meatpaper is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat. We like metaphors more than marinating tips. We are your journal of meat culture.

At once divisive and universal, delicious and disturbing, funny and dead-serious, meat polarizes us unlike any other food. Us, we’re ambidextrous here at Meatpaper — no agenda except to gnaw on the ideas, artistic excursions and bone-deep emotions the subject inspires. We invite you to dig in with us.” (more)

“The worldwide number of Internet users surpassed 1.59billion in 2008—up from only 2M+ in 1990, 45M in 1995 and 430M in 2000. Worldwide yearly increase in Internet users is 140M to 145M in the next five years, which means the 2B mark will happen in 2011 or 2012. Much of current and future Internet user growth is coming from populous countries—especially the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China. In the next decade many Internet users will be supplementing PC Internet usage with Smartphone, mobile phone and mobile device Internet usage. In developing countries many new Internet users will come from cell phone and Smartphone Internet usage. China now leads with over 235M Internet users at year-end 2008. The two most populous countries—China and India—are now in 1st and 3rd place in Internet users.” (more)

According to the CIA’ World Factbook there’s an estimated 6,79 billion people in the world (as of July 2009). So a little less than a quarter (23%) of the world population use Internet.