Stanford’s Tourist’s Map of Europe, May 1928
Europe in May 1928 was a continent still rearranging itself. Issued by Stanford’s Geographical Establishment, this map colors each country in contrasting tints and lays the post-Versailles borders across a continent barely a decade past the treaty. The British Isles carry a single red border around Great Britain and all of Ireland, while the label acknowledges the Irish Free State, a small cartographic hesitation that says a great deal about the period.
Railways are the real subject. Main and subsidiary lines cover Germany, most of England, and northern France in dense webs, then thin dramatically across eastern and south-eastern Europe. Between St. Petersburg and Moscow sits the famous kink known as the Tsar’s finger, straightened only in 2001. Coverage runs from the southern Mediterranean coast to the eastern shore of the Black Sea, reaching north only as far as southern Scandinavia, with colonial and mandated possessions marked along the Mediterranean rim. Latitude and longitude are ruled at 2-degree intervals.
Map Shop prints this reproduction from a high-resolution scan of the Edward Stanford Cartographic Collection archive. Available in the following formats:
- Paper
- Laminated
- Mounted to foam core
- Railed in black or walnut molding
- Framed

