James Monteiith

has been largely forgotten as an American cartographer, but his four-decade career demonstrated a surprisingly innovative and sophisticated approach to educating map users about comparative spatial relationships. Monteith’s geography textbooks were published widely in the United States from the late 1850s until well after his death, and they offered some of the most readily available reference maps in the country in the late nineteenth century. However, Monteith’s work has gone underappreciated, possibly because his books targeted school-aged audiences and his maps did not attempt to provide comprehensive detail. He was fundamentally an educator and publisher of teaching materials: he was not trying to create the latest sophisticated reference atlas. Indeed, it is not the maps themselves that make Monteith’s work so interesting, but rather the way he used comparative data, especially in the margins of those maps to amplify the map reader’s understanding of the cartographic story on the page. Monteith’s work evolved steadily over his career, and his later maps are complex works that invite continued study and generate new insights for the map reader. Andrew Rhodes