Mapping Wonderlands: Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912–1962 by Dori Griffin (review)

“Cartographs” are “illustrated, narrative, not-to-scale maps intended for popular audiences” (7). In Mapping Wonderlands, Dori Griffin uses these maps and other popular ephemera to explain how place, identity, and history in Arizona were packaged and promoted to automobile tourists in the first fifty years of statehood. In seven chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, Griffin examines some of this selected imagery to suggest how illustrated maps can offer contemporary viewers insights into the cultural history and physical landscape of Arizona. While the scope of the book is a fascinating subject, the success of the work is problematic.

Mapping Wonderlands fits into the growing research about twentieth-century visual culture history. Illustrated maps like many other media forms have attracted scholarly attention because they help to unravel how imagery created a popular narrative about people and place. So-called cartographs are a specialized form of imagery that typically appeared in popular travel books, guidebooks, and promotional magazines and brochures. The maps can include symbolic and romanticized representations to illustrate themes like American Indian sites, Spanish colonial monuments, and other roadside icons potentially attractive to automotive tourists.

Griffin sets out by contextualizing Arizona’s cartographic illustrations, perhaps the most useful chapter in her book. There is some discussion of the history of cartographs and a quite useful presentation about authors and artists (detailed in a biographical appendix) who created the illustrated maps. What follows are thematic chapters that explore identities, time, space, place, and cultural exoticism found in Arizona illustrated maps. These chapters are interesting on the one hand yet confusing on the other. While the author uses some 66 illustrations in the text, too often maps are described inconsistently, sometimes in excruciating detail but not illustrated, but more often they are not really analyzed in any meaningful way. When Griffin describes a map that is also an illustration in the text, there is frequently no corresponding discussion of what the description means and why or how it connects to the chapter theme. Further, there is considerable repetition in these chapters, a heavy dependence on cartographs published in the state tourist magazine Arizona Highways, and a reliance on postcards with maps and icons from the author’s personal collection. Nowhere does Griffin explain how many cartographs were published in Arizona Highways relative to other types of maps and illustrations, and she fails to inform the reader about the extent of her personal collection or why a particular example is valuable in its contribution to the declared theme. Using these data is not unreasonable, but an author needs to contextualize how representative those images might be. As a result of this non-critical approach, a reader sees examples of many illustrated maps and ephemera, but there is little attempt to tie the evidence to a larger idea that might have enabled significant inquiry and comparison of the examples.

Sadly, and frustratingly for a reader, there is no conclusion. There is a half-page summary and two pages of a new case study that Griffin suggests captures the essence of Mapping Wonderlands in a 2007 example. This device is useful, but it cannot substitute for the author explaining the role of visual narrative in one-half century of experiencing tourist Arizona. Griffin’s book is a pioneering effort, and as a first approximation, it has utility. Mapping Wonderlands holds elements of a fascinating contribution to the history of visual culture in the Southwest, but it lacks sufficient critical examination that might make the book truly wonderful.