The photo-mechanical era of cartography

This chapter looks at pre-computer map production. It approaches this through the author’s reflections of a decade of photo-mechanical map production from 1968 to 1978, being, generally, the years that he worked with manual map production. The chapter is loosely arranged to accord to the ‘flow’ of manual cartographic production during that decade:

Preparation of publications for printing and printing maps;

Manual plotting and scaling and process camera scaling;

Drawing the map and drawing media;

Mechanical composition: strip masks, pre-printed lettering, and scribing; and

Map reproduction and reprographics – processes leading to printing maps.