For the last five years,
Danny Cohen and I have been building up our joint collection of
subway maps. Both of us travel a good bit and are fans of good
design and, in particular, interested in the worldwide influence of
Harry Beck’s 1931 London subway map. Our collection is
carefully labelled and pinned up on a cork board on the wall outside
of Danny’s office in Sun Labs in Menlo Park, California.
Along with
the maps is a London Transport
Museum poster of Harry Beck’s original. Some of the maps
up are color printouts from the web but most were collected by Danny or
me or other Sun map fans on trips. The game is to find subway
maps from different places showing clear design descent
from Harry Beck’s original.
Danny just came home with a map of
Oslo. In total,
we have:
Barcelona TMB
Boston MBTA- Hamburg
U-Bahn and S-Bahn
London Tube
Moscow Московское метро
New York City MTA- Oslo
Paris Metro- San Francisco BART
- Stockholm
Sydney CityRail
In a web search, I find that there is a book by Ken Garland:
Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Capital Transport Publishing 1994),
and even a set of
Wikipedia entries about this. We are not alone!
Danny just said we should ask people to send us maps for our cork
board. If you find a subway map not listed above which is clearly
related to
Harry Beck’s original, please send it to:
Katy Dickinson
Sun Microsystems
16 Network Circle, Mail Stop: UMPK16-164
Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA
KatysBlog 
