Antique Map of California, The Golden State, Rand McNally, 1899

Name: Antique Map of California, The Golden State, Rand McNally, 1899
Brand: Rand McNally
SKU: BG-12793-2-69
Price: 555 USD
Availability: InStock

$555

€495 · dollar price at today's exchange rate

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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.

Date: 1899
Maker: Rand McNally
Kind: Maps
Technique: Lithograph
Color: Printed color
Size: 69 × 52 cm (27.2 × 20.5 in)
Condition: Good. Good condition for its age. Light age toning, deeper along the left edge, a faint pencil annotation near the lower right scale and the original central fold as issued. Please review the images for further condition details.
Period: The Gilded Age
Places: California
Reference: BG-12793-2-69

What the condition grades mean

Excellent: Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
Very good: Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
Good: Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
Fair: Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.

Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.

Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.

Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured. Delivery and import charges.

About this piece

This is Rand McNally's antique map of California from the 1899 indexed atlas, a double-page spread covering the entire state from the Oregon border to the Mexican line, with county boundaries in red and the Sierra Nevada, Coast Ranges and Central Valley in the atlas's finely hachured relief. A long red railroad legend at upper left, numbering close to forty lines, records the network in fine detail: the several divisions of the Southern Pacific, the Santa Fe, the North Pacific Coast and the California Northwestern serving Marin and Sonoma counties, and a scatter of short logging and resort lines including the Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railway and the Bodie Railway and Lumber Company.

Two insets extend the coverage beyond the main scale. At upper right, the San Francisco Bay Area, with Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano, Napa and Sonoma counties, is shown enlarged with Sacramento and the head of the Delta included. At lower left, the whole of Southern California, with Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, San Diego and the Channel Islands, is mapped at a matching enlarged scale, reflecting the population growth that region was already seeing by the end of the 1890s, well ahead of the boom the following century would bring.

The Mojave and Colorado deserts in the southeast and the Modoc Plateau in the extreme northeast are shown comparatively bare of detail, a fair reflection of how thinly those areas were settled, in contrast to the dense place-name coverage down the Central Valley and the coast. Scale on the main map is given as 32 statute miles to the inch.

Rand McNally grew from a Chicago printing business started in the 1850s by William Rand and joined by Andrew McNally, and by the 1890s it was one of the leading map publishers in the United States, known for railroad maps revised from issue to issue. This antique map of California is an original 1899 atlas sheet, printed as a color lithograph with the outline in black and the colors printed over it, and issued folded through the center. It is suitable for framing. The color is printed rather than applied by hand.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light age toning, deeper along the left edge, a faint pencil annotation near the lower right scale and the original central fold as issued. Please review the images for further condition details.

This is an original antique map, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.

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