Beautiful Old Maps
May 18, 2006
Old maps are a window into a world that no longer exists.
It turns out that the Library of Congress has a large collection of maps available on its website. Most of them are quite beautiful, and I’m especially impressed with the engraved pictures of nineteenth-century Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The Library of Congress allows you to download the images onto your computer, but they’re in either MrSID or JPEG 2000 format. You’ll probably need a special viewer to read the files; if you’re a Windows user, you can download one from the Library’s site, and Mac users can grab the ExpressView Browser Plug-in from LizardTech.
