One of the Great American Pictorial Maps of the Twentieth Century

"The Panama Canal as Seen by Charles H. Owens of the Los Angeles Times Art Staff from a Special Military Airplane",

This exquisitely detailed bird's-eye view was drawn by Charles H. Owens, "the first civilian artist to fly over the Canal Zone." Owens was an artist and cartographer best known for the maps he drew for the Los Angeles Times and his pen-and-ink drawings of the battlefronts during World War II. Here he capture the scope of this incredible achievement of engineering, with great detail of the locks. Numerous insets provide in-depth details of the Gatun Locks, monuments to Balboa and Columbus, and other Canal Zone scenes. Hornsby describes the map as "“A tour de force of invention. Owens’s Panama Canal is one of the great American pictorial maps of the twentieth century." He goes on to describe the map’s production in detail, calling it “one of Owens’s cartographic masterpieces” and that “it marked a major advance in the scale and ambition of bird’s-eye view pictorial mapping." Issued by the Panama Railroad Company.

References: Hornsby (Picturing America) p. 176.

Condition: B

A clean bright example, issued folding. There are a few small fold separations and a 1" x 1" section of loss at the top center fold junction.