The paper will present a brief background to the early twentieth century news-map, explaining how illustrative and cartographic traditions had educated the reader in using and interpreting maps. News-maps, maps showing ‘current’ events such as wars, had been part of the publishing landscape for centuries, and from the mid-1800s, a regular if limited inclusion in newspapers and popular journals. The market for maps began as early as the first printed maps, with writers’ and publishers’ attempts to distribute their works, and was not necessarily limited to elites of nobility or wealth. Even earlier manuscript traditions attempted to chronicle events such as the Crusades on maps. While early map-printing in Europe tended to describe and gradually update more or less stable regions, following the Ptolemaic formula, the transfer of Caesar’s de Bello Gallico in the 1460s, and other classical works established the ‘Seat of War’ as a popular topic for study and discussion. By the late 15th century the Nuremberg Chronicle reported on conflict and used maps and perspective views to represent unsettling events.

In the early twentieth century most maps depicting military subjects were operational tools, with limited public availability, or historical publications. In the late Victorian age of exploration study, publications for the British ‘serious reader’ responded to every historical subject, especially within the narrative of the Empire. Though cartographic publishing was at a zenith, many publishers were surprised by the onset of war, and had to scramble to meet demand from a populace seeking to understand the conflict, or apprehend where their son, husband or friends would be fighting. Patriots and store-keepers responded to the call for maps, generating some under license, and some not. In the press, the coincidence of improved communications technology, an avid reading public, national and imperial fervour, and personal involvement, led to an unrivalled volume of maps. Some maps for public consumption were derived from official sources or war correspondents, or adapted from the stock of commercial map makers, and some were works of fiction or imagination. Many were pictorial, combining elements of maps, text and pictures, or family pastimes. They could be large, lavish and expensive productions to be annotated according to weekly cables published in newspapers, or giveaways at the local grocer’s. Later, as the Empire required its recruits, news-maps followed them from Palestine to the Western Front, to answer the question: ‘where are our boys?’