Boston and Beyond, the third gallery exhibit of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, marks the public debut of one of the world's pre-eminent collections of urban bird's eye views and celebrates its preservation through a Save America's Treasures award.

Unlike conventional flat maps, bird's eye views are a fascinating kind of specialty map that present an urban area as if it was being viewed from an elevation of 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The town "below" appears in a kind of imaginative snapshot at a moment in history, revealing the factories, homes, parks, cemeteries, churches, and even the details of vernacular architecture.

The story of the exhibit, so vividly dramatized through these fascinating maps, is of the growing economic vitality and urbanization of Boston and the New England region during the last half of the 19th century, when industrialization and immigration were the primary engines of urban growth. These maps are also arresting works of popular art, all devised by the Boston craftsmen who were the leaders in the field. The public is reintroduced to these talented, forgotten artists and to a genre of graphic fine art not often seen today. To illuminate the process and intentions of the mapmakers for creating these unusual perspectives, the exhibit includes examples of their diaries, field sketch notes, and manuscript drawings.

The exhibit catalog features full-page color illustrations of the bird's eye views displayed in the exhibit, as well as extended captions discussing the history and economy of the individual communities. The views, which generally are not oriented with north at the top of the page, are paired with late 19th-century topographic maps that identify the artist's vantage point in composing the drawing. In addition, essays by Alex Krieger and Debra Block provide cartographical and historical background for appreciating this fascinating collection of urban views.

Essays. In the essays written to accompany the gallery exhibit, three scholars enrich our understanding of these unique bird's eye view maps and the 19th century historical milieu that produced them.

Ronald E. Grim, Ph.D., Curator of Maps at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, explores the unusual motives and perspectives for this kind of map-making in "Which Way North?"

In "As Though in Flight," Alex Krieger, FAIA, Professor in Practice, GSD, Harvard University, places the bird's eye views of this exhibit in a fascinating historical context stretching from centuries of imagined aerial views to the realities of today's Google Earth.

Debra Block, Ph.D., Director of Education at the Map Center, examines the implications of the signs of rapid urbanization and industrialization in the American 19th century landscape depicted in these bird's eye views in "Time Shifts: A Changing America, 1850 - 1900."

Journeys of the Imagination is an exhibition designed to explore the various ways that mapmakers from the 15th century until today have created and translated their real and imagined world views. They recorded these diverse and ever changing images on various media including paper, globes, and computer screens.

Their efforts allow us an opportunity to understand how cartographers were able to integrate the information that was well known, unknown, and still imbedded in their own imaginations.

The maps in this exhibition catalog depict the excitement of discovery and scientific investigation, the artwork, and the social, historical and cultural influences that informed the creation of these documents. These maps are examined, not just as geographic records of the world at a particular time, but as documents that have stories to tell, both about how and why the maps were created, and what they have to say about a particular cultures world view.

By skillfully integrating the four basic map elements of projection, orientation, scale, and symbols, mapmakers have been able to convey a variety of cartographic information to the public. This exhibition catalog explores the biases that inform cartographers preferences as they express their world views. This captivating selection of fifty maps judiciously samples the fascinating record of civilization in the context of its history, geography, politics, and religion.

The exhibition catalog provides full-page color illustrations of the maps displayed in the exhibition, as well as extended captions discussing the significance of the respective images. In addition, three scholarly essays, by Ronald E. Grim, Wesley A. Brown, and Susan Schulten highlight various aspects of the exhibition.

To the attentive user even the simplest map can reveal not only where things are but how people perceive and imagine the spaces they occupy. Mapping Boston is an exemplar of such creative attentiveness--bringing the history of one of America's oldest and most beautiful cities alive through the maps that have depicted it over the centuries.

The book includes both historical maps of the city and maps showing the gradual emergence of the New England region from the imaginations of explorers to a form that we would recognize today. Each map is accompanied by a full description and by a short essay offering an insight into its context. The topics of these essays by Anne Mackin include people both familiar and unknown, landmarks, and events that were significant in shaping the landscape or life of the city. A highlight of the book is a series of new maps detailing Boston's growth.

The book also contains seven essays that explore the intertwining of maps and history. Urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., starts with a capsule history of Boston. Barbara McCorkle, David Bosse, and David Cobb discuss the making and trading of maps from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Historian Nancy S. Seasholes reviews the city's remarkable topographic history as reflected in maps, and planner Alex Krieger explores the relation between maps and the physical reality of the city as experienced by residents and visitors. In an epilogue, novelist James Carroll ponders the place of Boston in contemporary culture and the interior maps we carry of a city.