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TAURANAC, John/ MICHAEL HERTZ ASSOCIATES/ MTA. [New York: 1979] New York Subway Map. 59 x 46 inches. Color printed on a single sheet; excellent condition. This is a truly remarkable survival: the first edition in a very large-scale format of what was the official New York City subway map for nearly the last 50 years. Intended for display in a subway station, the map’s large format highlights both the utility as well as beauty of the Tauranac/ Hertz creation. It was the official map of the subway system from 1979 to April of this year. The map was designed Michael Hertz Associates under the direction of John Tauranac. As indicated in an emblem at lower right, the Tauranac/ Hertz map appeared on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee (1904-1979) of the city’s subway system and was thus introduced with considerable fanfare. John Tauranac was chair of the MTA Subway Map Committee, which experimented with various designs for a new map beginning in the summer of 1977. Tauranac described this map as “quasi-geographical,” as it evokes geographic features and has some adherence to geographic reality, as opposed to the schematic, highly abstract approach found on Massimo Vignelli’s map, in use from 1972 to 1979. The Tauranac group opted for what they called a trunk color scheme, in which lines running off main lines would share the same color as the mainline, now so familiar to anyone who has used this map. The question as to which map would prevail in fact became a cause celebre, when Tauranac and Vignelli engaged in the now legendary, at least in cartographic circles, “Great Subway Map Debate,” at Cooper Union in 1978, in which both passionately argued for their different approaches. (There is in fact an entire book about this debate—see link below.) While Tauranac won the day, ironically, in April of 2025, a new map was adopted, and in a kind of cartographic redemption, it clearly follows Vignelli’s boldly modernist graphic style. See the link below. Interestingly, Tauranac himself grew frustrated with the official map, feeling it wasn’t keeping up to date with the many service changes and growing complexities of the system (See Augustyn/ Cohen, reference below, for more on this). So, in 1990, he audaciously published his own competing map of the subway system. He revised this a number of times, most recently in 2020, and it is published to this day. John Tauranac has been a lifelong student of the city’s infrastructure, architecture and has published numerous books on a variety of New York City-related topics: https://www.johntauranac.com/ Augustyn/ Cohen, Manhattan in Maps, p. 149 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/nyregion/nyc-new-subway-map.html?smid=em-share
Price: $5,500.00