Ein kartographisches Heft zum 80. Geburtstag Eduard Imhofs

Summary

This commemorative cartographic issue was published in honor of Eduard Imhof on his eightieth birthday and presents a broad survey of contemporary cartography, its historical foundations, technical practices, theoretical concerns, and educational challenges. The introductory article by E. Spiess portrays Imhof as an exceptionally active scholar, editor, teacher, and institution builder. Particular emphasis is placed on his long-term direction of Switzerland’s thematic national atlas, a task requiring sustained coordination with authors, acquisition and evaluation of data, development of legends and representational solutions, supervision of production schedules, and multilingual editing of accompanying commentaries. The issue also recalls Imhof’s forty-seven years of teaching at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he introduced thousands of engineering and geography students to cartographic drawing and effective graphic communication. His international influence was further consolidated through specialized university courses, publications, maps and atlases, and his role as founding president of the International Cartographic Association from 1959 to 1964. The contributions assembled in his honor span map history, topographic and thematic mapping, information transmission, production technology, and professional training. One highlighted historical study reassesses Jos Murer’s 1566 woodcut map of the Zurich region. Through comparison of surviving impressions, movable-type text panels, scale inscriptions, printing blocks, and documentary evidence, it disputes earlier bibliographic assumptions. No surviving impression can securely demonstrate a 1566 edition; the earliest attested edition dates from 1568 and was printed by Christoffel Froschauer the Younger. Copies formerly assigned to 1566 are shown to be substantially later. The study also expands the accepted publication sequence from five to nine editions, ranging from the unverified 1566 issue to Emil Matthieu’s 1966 printing, with intermediate editions in 1568, 1670, around 1700, 1759, around 1765, 1859–60, and 1883. The concluding material turns to cartographic education and literature. It argues that instruction should connect conceptual design, criteria for selecting forms of representation, and practical production procedures, using representative examples to prevent recurring errors among mapmakers. Although technical guidance may quickly be overtaken by innovation, systematic accounts of working methods remain valuable. Taken together, the available sections depict cartography as an integrated historical, scientific, graphic, technical, and pedagogical discipline, while presenting Imhof’s combination of scholarship, craftsmanship, leadership, and teaching as a model for its future development. Because the supplied text contains only the issue’s opening and closing portions, this summary is necessarily limited to the themes and findings explicitly documented there.