Rand McNally Diminutive Floor Globe
20th Century

This item is sold. It has been placed here in our online archives as a service for researchers and collectors.

Rand McNally Phyfe 12-Inch
Rand McNally & Co.
Diminutive 12-Inch Phyfe Style Terrestrial Floor Globe
Chicago: c. 1950s
32 inches high
Sold, please inquire as to the availability of similar items.

The terrestrial globe with metal hour disk, in full copper-finish meridian, raised on a Duncan Phyfe style mahogany stand with urn standard, and three molded downswept legs, ending in brass paw feet. Steamship routes are prominently indicated. Nation states colored grayish green, yellow, orange. Oceans blue. Israel, Siam, Indo-China, all shown, indicating date of 1950s.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Chicago became the leading center for commercial cartographic publishing in the United States. As the hub of the expanding American railroad system, it was logical for Chicago publishers to incorporate the latest railway routes into a complex mapping of America. In addition, cerography, an innovative wax-engraving printing technique, was adopted by Chicago publishers enabling larger printings and more efficient updates of maps and atlases.

The production of terrestrial globes also proliferated in Chicago. A.H. Andrews, a clerk for the major east coast Holbrook family of globemakers, traveled to Chicago to begin his own globe business in the early 1860s. A.H. Andrews & Co. was succeeded by C.F. Weber & Co. at the turn of the Century, and then by Weber Costello Company about 1907.

Rand McNally and Company became a preeminent publisher of maps and atlases in Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s, then ventured into globe making in the 1890s, and continues in business today. As noted by scholar and librarian Cynthia H. Peters, the company "has become synonymous with mapmaking in American life," and "[t]heir success highlights the movement of the American map publishing industry's center of gravity from the East to the Midwest."

Cartouche: Rand McNally/ INDEXED/ TERRESTRIAL/ GLOBE/ Diameter 12 inches/ Distances in statute miles/ One inch equals 666 miles/ See Great Circle Measuring Scale/ along 30 W. Longitude/ Copyright by/ Rand McNally & Company, Chicago/ Made in U.S.A.