Book reviews: Atlas of the Republic of Austria

Summary

This review evaluates the first installment of the Atlas of the Republic of Austria, launched in 1961 as a multi-part project designed to portray the country’s physical, demographic, economic, transport, administrative, and cultural geography. The initial installment contains maps of topography, climate, phenology, prehistoric settlement, land use, agricultural yields, transportation, tourism, administration, and elections, thereby demonstrating both the breadth of the planned atlas and its cartographic techniques. The reviewers particularly commend the detailed topographic base, the seasonally differentiated sunshine maps, and the effective use of dot mapping for land-use and crop-area distributions. They nevertheless criticize the topographic map’s pale color scheme and the discontinuity of its hypsometric scale, which impede visual interpretation. Overall, the atlas is judged a substantial contribution to geographical and cartographic scholarship.