An excellent article was written by Andres Picon for the San Francisco Chronicle, and posted to the David Rumsey website. It’s a great read – and the visuals are unsurpassed. Following is a short teaser from the article.
Deep inside Stanford University’s Green Library, David Rumsey makes his way up a winding staircase, stopping at every turn to admire the various historical map wallpapers that stretch from floor to ceiling. With infectious excitement, he takes in the Paraná River in South America, Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, Mount Kailash in Tibet and even the constellations, depicted colorfully in a massive celestial chart.
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The map center, home to an estimated 250,000 physical maps and more than 200,000 digital maps from 1500 to the present — most of them donated by Rumsey — is a cross between a library and a laboratory, replete with leatherbound atlases, spinning globes, enormous high-definition touchscreens and several virtual reality stations.