[leto_ii]

I would like to add one of my finds (if it's already mentioned in the original post, sorry for the double) - the National Atlas of Japan (1977) [1].

Take a look at the railway traffic statistics [2]. The visualization there must have been painstaking to make.

[1] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/atlas-e-etsuran.html

[2] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/archive/j-atlas-d_e_49.pdf

edit:

The earthquake epicenter visualization is also worth mentioning:

[3] https://www.gsi.go.jp/atlas/archive/j-atlas-d_e_11.pdf

[paganel]

On the subject of great-looking maps I highly recommend the second Austro-Hungarian Military Survey [1] from the 1860s-1870s, some of the details in those maps are truly exceptional (one of my personal projects consists in mapping the forested area of Romania's territory from nowadays using those maps).

A little less accurate but more beautiful is the first Hapsburg Military Survey, from the late 1700s [2], when and if I'll ever get a bigger house I'll definitely hang some prints of those maps on the walls.

[1] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurvey/?laye...

[2] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey/?layer...

[parsecs]

Those are some beautiful visualizations. How did they do it in 1977, considering modern software like Tableau don't exist? The amount of expertise that goes into this must've been substantial.

[nl]

In that timeframe, most visualisation was hand-drawn (especially on maps which were all hand drawn).