Mapping the world

Walter Ristow Dies at 97; Populist Curator of Maps

Walter W. Ristow, who was known never to have gotten lost and would have had no excuse if he had — considering he was in charge of more maps than anybody else in the world — died April 3 in Mitchellville, Md. He was 97.

The cause was coronary artery disease, his family said.

Dr. Ristow was head of the map divisions at the New York Public Library, which has more than 400,000 maps, and later at the Library Congress, which holds more than 5 million maps.

He is credited with molding the profession of the modern-day map librarian, and was a prolific cartographic scholar as well, writing hundreds of articles and several important books.

"Walter Ristow may be accounted one of the most influential figures — perhaps the most influential figure — in map librarianship in the United States, and he has won the highest international standing in his field," Helen Wallis, the map librarian at the British Library, wrote in 1979.

Dr. Ristow's writings covered maps as far back as those of 16th-century explorers. But quirky detours into more populist terrain kept popping up: Dr. Ristow (pronounced RIS-toe) wrote discursively about the history of free gas station road maps, lamenting their extinction after billions were printed.

He also told of the usefulness of maps of 12,000 American cities and towns produced by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company. "Geography is about the human interaction with the land; a map makes a very definite statement: 'This is where it is,' " said John Hébert, head of the Geography and Maps Division at the Library of Congress. "Dr. Ristow knew that maps can take us from where we are to where we aren't.

"He saw maps as the way we document man's impact on the land." ...

At the New York library's map room, Dr. Ristow was delighted that his job included fielding geographic questions. Where were the Western cattle trails? How do I get to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn? Where is the Far East? Could you settle an argument and tell us how far a ship would be visible before disappearing over the horizon?

A visitor once requested and got a map of Pomerania from Dr. Ristow, who later asked if she had found what she wanted. "Not yet," she answered, throwing open her coat to reveal a Pomeranian dog. "I'm looking for a name for him."

After Pearl Harbor, Dr. Ristow showed up at Room 312 on the library's third floor only at lunch hours. It turned out that he was huddling with spies in a nook of Rockefeller Center, making map packets for bomber pilots. The two jobs came together when he was asked to use the library to find spellings of place names from intercepted messages. ...

His hobbies included using watercolors to reproduce historic maps. After he died, his family found a bulging file of handwritten maps — directions to people's houses and so on — he had collected over many years. He had evidently been planning to write about them.

That would've been a very interesting book, maybe somebody else will write it now.

'Populist curator of maps'--what an apt headline.

Uncredited photo of Walter Ristow via the Times.