1936 McCaffrey and Alaska Steamship Company Map of Alaska

TerritoryofAlaska-mccaffrey-1936
$450.00
Territory of Alaska. The All-American Route - Alaska Steamship Company - Serving All of Alaska! - Main View
Territory of Alaska. The All-American Route - Alaska Steamship Company - Serving All of Alaska! - Main View
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1936 McCaffrey and Alaska Steamship Company Map of Alaska

TerritoryofAlaska-mccaffrey-1936

Promotes tourism to Alaska in the 1930s.
$450.00

Title

Territory of Alaska. The All-American Route - Alaska Steamship Company - Serving All of Alaska!
  1936 (dated)     20 x 30 in (50.8 x 76.2 cm)     1 : 5200000

Description

This is a first edition 1936 Frank McCaffrey map of Alaska created for the Alaska Steamship Company. Sea routes between Seattle and cities and towns in Alaska are highlighted, including the route up the Inside Passage. Juneau, Sitka, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Dutch Harbor, and Nome are all labeled, as are numerous smaller towns and villages. Mt. McKinley (Denali) National Park, and Glacier Bay National Park are noted. The Alaska Highway is also noted, as are gold placers and oil fields.
Inset Maps
An inset map covering from Anchorage to Fairbanks is situated in the upper right and details the Alaska Railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. A second inset map within the larger depicts the Aleutian Islands from Attu to Umnak and labels each. A globe, along the bottom border places Alaska in a broader geographical context. It also includes a table of distances to various cities in Alaska from Seattle. A key in the lower-left provides important information concerning notations used. The whole is flanked by illustrations of totem poles that are indicative of those created by the Northwest Coast Indian peoples.
Publication History and Census
This map was created by Frank McCaffrey and published in 1936 for the Alaska Steamship Company. McCaffrey created at least two different editions of this map, the present first edition published in 1936 and a second edition which dates from 1949. The 1936 edition is well represented in institutional collections.

Cartographer

Frank McCaffrey (1894 - 1985) was an American artist, publisher, letterpress printer, and politician. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McCaffrey moved to Spokane, Washington, with his family at the age of four. After finding a fascination with printing at a very young age, McCaffrey began an apprenticeship in Spokane and by 1913 he was working as a journeyman printer in Seattle, where he would spend the rest of his life. McCaffrey bought Acme Press, a commercial publishing firm in Seattle, in 1919 and in 1931 founded Dogwood Press as a trademark within Acme. For McCaffrey, his artistic goal when printing a book was for the book's presentation to 'reflect and enhance its content'. At Dogwood, he printed 'for the pleasure of the doing' and saw 'the same opportunity for subtle expression of personality as painting or modeling' in printing. Dogwood served as his creative outlet and was home to some of his 'finest and most limited productions'. Works published by Dogwood even had certain hallmarks, such as stout boards covered with patterned clot and rough, untrimmed page edges. Printing, for McCaffrey, was always a personal pursuit. He sold Acme in 1952, but kept Dogwood, and continued printing. He produced pamphlets for friends and an occasional hardback book. McCaffrey loved to champion Seattle authors and history and, in 1980, he donated a large quantity of printing materials to the newly formed book arts program at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. McCaffrey served for two-and-a-half-years on Seattle's city council and ran for mayor twice. More by this mapmaker...

Condition

Good. Light wear along original fold lines. Small areas of loss at fold intersections. Light dampstaining.

References

OCLC 9161418, 953568168, 46696272.