Jake Coolidge: “It’s a great way to learn a place, to try to map it well.”

Very Expensive Maps

Redwood City cartographer and artist Jake Coolidge on making maps the hard way with ink, graphite, a metal scribe, copper, wax and ferric chloride, the difference between in silico and in vivo cartographic generalization, creating novel projections with two-point perspective, learning to letter backwards, training the eye before you train your mouse hand, how a mapmaking process will teach you something about the landscape, and his efforts to combine the handmade with the digital. See his work at jakecoolidgecartography.com

• 15x11” Mt. Rainier: intaglio print from a copper plate etching
• 55x13.5” California
• 32x17” Columbia River Watershed
• 60x15” Western Shore of Lake Michigan
• Speculative bay area transit map
• Oakland bike route map
• DeLorme road atlas
• Stanford Spatial History Project
• QGIS
• Richard Edes Harrison
• Erwin Raisz
• Print Zero Studios
• Nikki Jabbora-Barber
• Harry Beck’s London Tube Map
• Eduard Imhof
• Daniel Huffman (taught me how to map 🙏)
• Amy Lee Walton
• Mamata Akella
• Jim Eynard
• Joe Milbrath
• Alex Fries
• Tom Patterson
• Becca Holdhusen
• Nolli map of Rome
• Turgot map of Paris
• NACIS conference

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