Reinhartz, Dennis & Charles C. Colley, eds., The Mapping of the American Southwest. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-89096-237-5. 25xl8cm., xv, 83pp., plus color plates, hard cover. (Drawer C., College Station, TX 77843, $24.50)

This nicely produced book contains four papers from a symposium held in 1983: Spanish and French Mapping of the Gulf of Mexico in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; Herman Moll, Geographer: Early Eighteenth-Century European View of the American Southwest; United States Army Mapping in Texas, 1848-50 and Images of the Southwest in Nineteenth-Century American Atlases.  All of the articles are good, but I especially enjoyed the discussion of the much-maligned Moll's maps.  Whatever Moll's merits, his influence on cartography was enormous, if only because of his huge output.  Moll's reputation has never been good.  As early as 1748 his county maps were dismissed as "little erroneous trifles." I had always thought Moll was originally Dutch, but apparently he came from Bremen.  There is a very useful appendix listing all of Moll's atlases, and also many books containing his maps.  This alone is worth the price of the book, even for those not interested particularly in the Southwest.  The final article is illustrated with seldom reproduced maps by Lucas, Tanner, Morse, and Colton.  There is even a map published by Matthews-Northrup, the first of theirs I can recall seeing reproduced.

David C. Jolly, 1990