Map Reading in Travel Writing: the ‘Explorers’ Maps’ of Mexico, This Month

Abstract

In a 1959 audit of the English-language travel magazine, Mexico, This Month, a prospective buyer singled out for particular criticism the disproportionate wages of its staff artists, indicating that if he took over, ‘I would insist upon firing [them]... and buy such material on an assignment per piece basis’. The North American was exercised by not only the cost of the magazine’s art work but also its style, which, according to his withering assessment, ‘is pretentious and arty to the extent of being obscure and effete... of a school which I would not, in all justification and knowledge of this business, accept’. In his view, images for public consumption ‘must be on a least common denominator level, communicating instantly the intent of the artist’. The existing art work, he advised, which included a series of hand-drawn centrefold maps of Mexico, contradicted the commercial aims of the magazine in which ‘Good photographic cover would be infinitely better, have more punch and sell than the obscure approach of [the artist] Vlady who seems dearly in love with his own work.’¹ Such unvarnished remarks (from a blistering account of the magazine’s operations) bring into focus a number of key issues relating to the broader function and interpretation of illustrated material — and especially maps — in the travel narrative, which is the subject of what follows.²