Airline Maps: A Century of Art and Design

This is a gorgeous collection of maps and other advertising materials from the early days of aviation to the present. It’s a nice oversize book, not too heavy, perfect for spreading out on a table and poring over. The authors accompany all photos with captions that provide details of the artists, trends in the industry and in society at the time, and explain at a very high level the histories of the various airlines. There were many I hadn’t heard of, and a lot of beautiful illustrations. My favourites were the Canadian Airlines “pinball machine” poster, with close seconds being the Air Canada and Swissair “wiring diagram” ones.

And while I liked the explanatory text in the photo captions, I found the running commentary had show more layout issues—this book must have been a challenge to lay out. There wouldn’t be a lot of room on the page for the commentary, so sometimes it would cut off mid-sentence and be continued six pages later. This made it hard to keep the narrative thread. So perhaps my only suggestion for another book of this type would be to provide an essay for each chapter at the beginning, then just present the photos and their captions.

I would recommend this for people who like travel posters and airplanes. show less