David Woodward and J. B. Harley conceived of The History of Cartography series in 1977. It was born in an effort to encourage connoisseurs of maps, devotees of map history, and specialists dedicated to identifying and describing early maps to also consider how and why people have made and used maps. In the coming years, treating maps as cultural documents generated so many new insights that the resource they initially planned expanded from a four book series to six broadly inclusive and increasingly large volumes to be published in eight installments.
J. B. Harley (1932-1991)
David Woodward (1942-2004)
Woodward established what would become the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981. After Harley’s death in 1991 and then Woodward’s in 2004, Matthew Edney was appointed Project director in 2005.
David Woodward sitting on a marble replica of the Tasman Map of 1644 in the entrance hall of The State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
The Project has prepared four published volumes. The first three volumes grew to become five books, 144 chapters, 2,740 illustrations, 5,060 pages, 16,023 footnotes, and 3.1 million words. The editors decided to structure the last three volumes as large, multilevel, interpretive encyclopedias. For Volume Six, the first of the encyclopedic volumes to be published, 323 contributors provided 529 entries, arranged in alphabetical order and with a comprehensive volume index, that together comprise 1,906 pages, 850,000 words, 5,115 references, 1,153 illustrations, and front and end matter, all bound in two parts. Volume Six is the first in the series to also be published as an e-book. Volumes Four and Five will have the same size, design, use of color, and print and e-book formats as Volume Six.