Maine.

This exuberant mid-century pictorial map of Maine is a showpiece of American state cartography from the golden age of illustrated travel and souvenir maps. Rendered in bright gouache-style color and bordered by an oversized leaping brook trout, a bounding white-tailed buck, and a giant scarlet lobster, it is a lively reminder of how Maine presented itself to postwar American vacationers as a ‘sportsman’s paradise.’

The state’s outline is left largely white and uncluttered, allowing its river systems, in delicate blue line work, to thread through a dense scatter of illustrated icons. Logging and paper-making, longstanding pillars of the Maine economy, appear repeatedly: rafts of logs on Moosehead Lake, a loaded pulp truck, and the Ripogenus Dam in the north woods. Wildlife fills the interior, including moose, black bear, ducks, loons, ruffed grouse, and deer, alongside sporting imagery of fishing, hunting, and skiing that evokes the state’s outdoor recreation appeal. Historic sites and institutions are marked with small cartouche-like vignettes, among them Fort Kent, Fort William Henry, Fort Edgecomb, Burnham Tavern, the Knox Mansion at Thomaston, the Augusta State House, and the campuses of the University of Maine, Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin. Long-distance trails are traced in color, including the Arnold Trail commemorating Benedict Arnold’s 1775 march to Quebec and the Appalachian Trail winding past Mount Katahdin, its northern terminus. The coastline, rendered in a deeper blue, carries lighthouses, sailboats, a lobster boat, and Acadia National Park, while the borders are framed with oversized studies of pinecones, sprays of Maine pine, red maple foliage, and native birds, in the tradition of the illustrated corner borders on older decorative state maps.

The map was drawn by the cartographer and illustrator team of J. G. Shelley and Louis Koster and was printed by Simonds, Payson Co. Pictorial state maps of this type were typically issued in modest print runs for regional distribution through bookstores, gift shops, and tourism offices, and surviving examples are consequently scarce on the market today, particularly in the bright, unfaded color seen here.