Atlas Making: A Study of Alexander Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas , 1848–1856

This article examines the making of Alexander Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas: the 1848 first edition, the second and enlarged 1856 edition, and the intermediate reduced edition of 1850. In examining the editions of the Physical Atlas attention is paid to Johnston’s personal papers and unpublished correspondence to reveal how he worked, with whom, and to what end. The article draws upon work in processual map history, the history of science, and the connections between book history and map history to examine the collaborative authorship in the atlas’s maps and letterpress text, and to illustrate the ways in which Johnston promoted his own authority as he also depended upon that of others in using the atlas to promote physical geography and the sciences in the mid-nineteenth century.