A new Czechoslovak national atlas

W. Stams reviews the 1966 Atlas of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, tracing its origins to a 1952 plan to rework the 1935 Atlas of the Czechoslovak Republic and a decision to proceed at the 1957 geographers’ congress in Brno. Completed after nine years, it was published by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Central Administration of Geodesy and Cartography, with 80 institutions and 390 contributors named. Stams credits the Academy’s National Atlas working group with supporting progress and internal consistency. The 68 plates contain about 440 maps, principally at 1:1,000,000, with explanatory texts and English and Russian titles, legends, and summaries. The review surveys physical geography, population, economy, transport, trade, and culture, praising the geological, population-change, land-use, and agricultural-production-type maps. It discusses larger-scale insets and a new areal cartogram distinguishing urban and rural conditions, while criticizing overloaded maps, unclear symbols, and the limited ability of static statistics to convey social change. Comparison with the prewar atlas offers only limited relief from this last problem. Stams recommends more systematic integration of detailed topographic extracts with generalized national overviews, suggesting that further development could guide future atlases. He judges the atlas a high-ranking scientific, cartographic, and printing achievement and closes by endorsing its potential to publicize the socialist state’s accomplishments.