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How Advertisers Have Used Maps to Try to Sell You Stuff

A huge collection of “persuasive maps” — newly available online — reveals how our trust in cartography can be used to sway us.

People seem to trust maps more than other forms of conveying information. It’s one thing to read that a city is racially segregated; seeing it on a map makes it seem more real. Our natural inclination to believe whatever we see on maps makes them excellent tools of persuasion.

This unique power has put maps at the center of many propaganda operationsmorality movements, and political debates. Just last week, a map showing which parts of the country would be hurt by a U.S. withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) helped persuade the president to scrap that plan.

“Almost every child has a recollection of a parent unfolding a road map when you're very young, and then driving to some place where you've never been before by following the map,” says P.J. Mode, a retired lawyer who collects maps that were specifically designed to persuade people in one way or another. “You learn when you're tiny, from watching your family, that you can trust a map, the map is dependable, it gets you from A to B.”

Mode has amassed more than 800 “persuasive maps,” most of which can be seen online as part of the Cornell University Library’s digital collections. More than 500 of these became available online in April. Over a hundred of the maps represent some form of advertising, such as the beautiful map of the New York City area at the top of the post—one of Mode’s favorites—from an 1897 ad for “the largest dealers in horses in the world.”

Advertisers like using maps “because they carry a greater presumption of credibility than any other medium of communication,” Mode says. “Advertisers live and die for greater credibility, and therefore they gravitate to the medium of cartography.”

According to Mode’s research, a British shipping company ripped off the logo of the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, for the cover of its 1912 promotional brochure (above). “This brochure, which is illustrated with this cover—it's really quite beautiful—never attributes it,” Mode says. “I'm sure they were violating somebody's copyright."