Bibliographies of National Atlases

In the 1950s, following the establishment of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on National Atlases, the Institute of Geography of the Polish Academy of Sciences undertook the compilation of a bibliography of national atlases. Its first result was National Atlases: Sources, Bibliography, Articles, presented at the International Geographical Congress in Stockholm in 1960. Compiled by J. Drecka and H. Tuszyńska-Rękawek under the direction of S. Leszczycki, it listed 130 single-country atlases published between 1900 and 1959. Only about forty were judged to meet the criteria for national atlases established by the Commission. The bibliography was therefore more than a list of publications: it also reflected how the Commission defined the boundaries of the genre.

The series was subsequently revised and expanded in connection with successive International Geographical Congresses. Following consultations within the Commission in 1962, the new edition presented at the 1964 Congress in London extended its scope to regional atlases. Supplemented and corrected with the assistance of experts from different countries, it listed 361 works published between 1900 and 1962. Further volumes appeared in 1968, 1972, and 1976, listing 191, 205, and 206 atlases respectively.

Beyond this continuing series, another important achievement was W. Stams’s National and Regional Atlases: A Bibliographic Survey, covering publications up to and including 1978 and listing 2,007 atlases. First presented at a meeting in Leipzig in 1974, it was subsequently expanded with the assistance of some eighty scholars from sixty countries. At Ferjan Ormeling’s initiative, an English edition was prepared and published by the International Cartographic Association in 1980. It was for a time regarded as the last comprehensive bibliography in the field, but further compilations followed. In 1990, A. G. Kozubenko compiled National Atlases: A Bibliographic Index in Moscow, a Russian-language bibliography. Based on information available through December 1989, it described more than 130 national atlases of foreign countries published after 1950.

All the cartobibliographies of national and regional atlases are collected here.