Maps and atlases: Bibliographies

Summary

This article is a comprehensive scholarly review of bibliographic resources on maps and atlases, systematically covering major bibliographies from the Soviet Union and other countries. The opening section introduces bibliographies of bibliographies, notably highlighting Gavrilova and Riabtseva's work on sources of information on maps and atlases, which describes 64 serial bibliographies organized by region. The article then details the Cartographic Annals, the official annual bibliography of Soviet maps and atlases published by the All-Union Book Chamber, which systematically catalogs maps and atlases under categories including world maps, continental maps, maps of individual countries (especially the USSR), historical maps, biographical maps, astronomical maps, and scientific-reference atlases. In the section on general bibliographies, the article highlights Salishchev's ongoing bibliographic series on geographical atlases published in the Itogi nauki series, as well as important works by Churkin, Cepiene, and others. The thematic maps section covers bibliographies on physical feature maps, vegetation mapping, economic maps, agricultural maps, and population maps, with notable contributions from Preobrazhenskii's Russian Economic Maps and Atlases and Babanskii's Economic Cartography. The historical maps section presents valuable resources including Bagrov's history of geographical maps, a union catalogue of 18th-century Russian geographical atlases, and catalogues of manuscript historical maps held in the State Historical Museum. The latter half of the article systematically lists regional atlases of Soviet oblasts and republics, including those of Leningrad, Moscow, Murmansk, Sakhalin, and dozens of other regions, detailing each atlas's content structure which typically covers natural conditions, population, economy, culture, and history. The article also covers atlases of areas outside the Soviet Union, with particular attention to the two-volume Atlas of Antarctica, which contains 225 plates covering exploration history, geology, climate, glaciation, Southern Ocean hydrology, biology, and physical-geographical regionalization, accompanied by an index of approximately 5,000 place names. Overall, this article provides a systematic and comprehensive bibliographic guide to maps and atlases, serving as an essential reference for research in the history of cartography and geographical documentation.