Nouvelle Carte de la France Indiquant les Routes, les Chins de Fer les Stations Thermales et Balneaires D'Apres les Documents les Plus Recents [Shotgun Map of France]
Nouvelle Carte de la France Indiquant les Routes, les Chins de Fer les Stations Thermales et Balneaires D'Apres les Documents les Plus Recents [Shotgun Map of France]
map 55 x 61 on sheet 84 x 64 (centimeters, height x width)
Notes:
This is a routine map of France, modified and overprinted to serve as a poster advertisement for shotguns.
The basic map was produced by Dufrenoy in Paris in 1896, BnF #GE-C-2179. The original was 71 cm high, with four inset maps: three at the lower left, in the Atlantic (Paris; Algeria et Tunise; Situation des Colonies Françaises) and one at the lower right, in the Mediterranean (Corse).
In the revised version, the title cartouche and legend have been moved into the space at the left where the three insets maps had been, the inset of Corsica at the lower right has been retained, and the map has been printed on a sheet 9 cm higher. The resulting blank spaces have been filled with an advertisement for “P. Lardin, Gunsmith,” and images of 12 shotguns.
Paul Lardin was a gunsmith in Bar-Le-Duc (a small town about halfway between Paris and Strasbourg) from 1855 to 1903. The advertisement mentions his “very large selection of shotguns of all kinds” with emphasis on a five-shot Browning version.
This was plainly intended to serve as a poster. A French law enacted in 1881 required that all public posters bear a tax stamp, and the legend at the lower right reads "Stamp Before Posting in a Public Place."
The date is estimated based on the publication of the Dufrenoy map; it could be as late as 1903, when Lardin's business apparently ended.
This map is strikingly similar to another routine map overprinted at roughly the same time to advertise the shotguns of a Belgian gunmaker: ID #2544, "Italia Geografica Statistica e. Postale" (1910). For other examples of overprinted or otherwise repurposed maps in the collection, Search > "repurposed".
