Atlas of Sweden

The review examines Atlas över Sverige while publication was still underway: issues had appeared since 1953, and more than half of the planned contents were available. An initial proposal prompted by the 1899 Atlas of Finland was deferred for lack of funds and data; M. Lundqvist’s programme was approved in 1948 by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography. Esselte participated in compilation, publication and distribution, with support from the Wallenberg foundation, government and private funding. The plan comprised 150 multicolour sheets containing about 1,000 maps and 600 pages of explanatory text, covering physical geography, population, economic activities, social and cultural conditions, politics and history. Compilation drew on institutional data, individual researchers, special fieldwork and office-based studies; the principal map scale was 1:2,000,000. The reviewer highlights the first nationwide hypsometric and relief-energy maps, detailed Quaternary mapping, reconstructions of glacial retreat, and climate maps based on 1901–1930 observations. Forest maps used national inventories, population maps combined dots and proportional squares, and industrial maps used standardized net-output-value classes to permit comparisons across branches. The reviewer praises the systematic treatment of sources, explanatory texts, colour design and printing, and their usefulness for resource assessment, planning and teaching. Criticisms concern the predominance of analytical maps, missing regionalization and synthetic economic maps, absent genetic geomorphological and soil maps, the separate treatment of high-mountain areas on the Quaternary map, and the omission of neighbouring countries and seas from many map backgrounds. Despite these limitations, the reviewer regards the atlas as a major achievement of Swedish geography and cartography.