When a Map Should Probably Not Have Been Made

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This pamphlet was a little confusing to me--at first I thought it would fit into a category of Outsider creations, a small collection of pamphlets filled with some towering and submerged ideas on curing the Depression, keeping the U.S. out of war, flagpole painting, zipper repair, exrta-Earths populating the (regular) Earth, eyestalk plant people of Mars, flooding the Sahara, damming the Hudson River, nuclear powered _____, mega weapons, mega planes, hair massage for higher IQ, and so on. The design of the pamphlet certainly had the feel and look of a great attempt at conveying some secret truth, it turns out that it is pretty straightforward, an 1890's/1900's  appeal to folk on acting courteously and amicably towards others to achieve a one-government-something. 

The message was very simple: do good, be kind, help people, live your religion.  It was the work of a very successful bookseller and publisher in Melbourne, Edward William Cole¹. He sounds like he was an interesting guy, autodidact and entrepreneurial, born in the U.K. and migrating to Cape Colony and on to Australia, spending time in the gold diggings, exploring the Murray, and settling into Melbourne where he opened up a bookshop in 1864 which morphed into a large arcade with many rented kiosks.

Cole wrote a number of short pamphlets, published them, and either sold or gave them away--the pamphlet presented here was probably a gift to his customers. It published eight essays of 660 collected for the prize of publication, extolling brotherhood and the commonality of the human condition, appealing for kindness and the common good, and reading above nearly all else. 

The imagery on the rear cover is striking, most of the artwork being the fronts and backs of medals/medallions that Cole had made. The image in the middle of it all is, well, very surprising, and potentially disturbing, though it seems unconnected to any of the essays or sentiments of the pamphlet, and seems largely to be a non sequitur.  In any event there seems to be no connective text, nothing on race dominance or eugenicism, the only thing that comes close to that is a repeated belief that English should be the dominant world language for its "perfection".  As dire as it seems the map seems to be open to speculation, though on the face of it doesn't look like much good could come . Is it something as nasty as showing what the map maker thinks are the natural divisions of the world according to race, or could it possibly be suggesting that skin color is based on location on the globe and has nothing to do with any sponsorship of superiority or inferiority based on color? Given the rest of what seems to be in this pamphlet, it seems likely that the later is the case. The guy would've been better served if he left the map out.

I'm reproducing the artwork here because there seems to be little mention² of this work outside of stiff and undated bibliographies of books-received. 

Notes:

1.  Cole's entry in the Dictionary of Australian Biography: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cole-edward-william-3243

2.  According to WorldCat there's another version of this work, fleshed out to 207pp,, printed around the same time (the librarian guesses '189_') and located in just one library (Victoria). There's only one copy located of the copy mentioned here, located at the Murdoch library, 11,564 miles from where I sit in western North Carolina.