Category Archives: Europe

Emptying Europe

Posted on May 7, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Where Europe’s Population is Shrinking, is an excellent example of how large-scale spatial data and clear visual design can come together to tell a nuanced geographic story. In this case, the story is one of Europe’s rural depopulation and how … Continue reading →

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Hotel Retro

Posted on May 6, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Letterform Archive has published a new large format peel and stick book Hotel Retro: Vintage Luggage Labels from Tokyo to Buenos Aires. A 330-sticker-long journey through this new age of global travel by train and sea designed by San Francisco agency MacFadden & … Continue reading →

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France and Canada share a border (really)

Posted on April 29, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Canada and France share a maritime border, despite the ejection of France from North America in the Seven Years’ War. Article 6 of the 1763 Treaty of Paris allowed France to retain the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the … Continue reading →

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A rare literary find and more stuff you need to see

Posted on April 27, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…” from the … Continue reading →

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Discover Britain with Geograph

Posted on April 19, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Geograph: You don’t have to be an Anglophile to get lost in this wonderful project. It’s a bit like like Google maps, but crowdsourced  – “The Geograph® Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for … Continue reading →

Posted in Cartography, Europe, Maps, Photography | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Snow Joke

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Depending on one’s point of view, we have either been cursed or blessed with an abundance of snow this season. Which ever side prevails here in the former U.S. of A., our vocabulary for snow is basic. But the Swedes … Continue reading →

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Thirty-six Views of the Eiffel Tower

Posted on January 20, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Les Trente-Six Vues de la Tour Eiffel is a book that contains 36 lithographs by Henri Rivière printed in 1902. These lithographs reflect the social, political, and artistic changes that had occurred in Paris by the end of the nineteenth … Continue reading →

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Paris 1970

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

I recently learned about an amateur photography contest called ‘C’était Paris en 1970’ (‘This Was Paris in 1970’), whose roughly fourteen thousand participants produced seventy thousand black-and-white prints and thirty thousand color slides of the capital in the midst of … Continue reading →

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Alice is back home

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Christ Church Oxford and the Bodleian Libraries have become joint owners of an exceptionally rare first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the most important of only 22 known surviving copies of the first and subsequently withdrawn edition. The book … Continue reading →

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Where in the world

Posted on December 13, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I recently spotted the photo above on a random book blog. There was no attribution nor indication where or when the photograph was taken. However, I had the uncanny notion that at some unknown point in time I had actually … Continue reading →

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