Simplified globe

In the collection of over one hundred and twenty objects of Polish-language globes of the Earth from the 19th to the 21st century that the Wincenty Field Manor House has managed to gather over the past four decades, many items can be classified as ‘unusual’ globes. One of them is undoubtedly the so-called simplified globe, published in 1948 by the ‘Przełom’ publishing house in Kraków. The authors of the globe map (a physical map in the scale of 1:60 million) were a geographer and climatologist, later a professor at Jagiellonian University, Władysław Milata (1911-1954) and a geographer and geomorphologist, later a professor at Wrocław University, Wojciech Walczak (1916-1984). This globe was published in a considerable edition of 33,300 copies. It was in a way a response to difficult times just after the war, when schools were in ruins and deprived of teaching aids, with families living modestly. In this case, the map of the globe was divided into twenty equilateral triangles, set together in the form of a zigzag. It was sold in flat form – a colour print on cardboard. The buyer's task was to carefully cut out the map, bend it in the indicated places and carefully glue it together. The finished, slightly horned globe could be hung on a string, which had to be glued at the North Pole. This object also belongs to a subset of non-spherical globes in our collection, which also includes a series of twelve-sided folding globes with thematic maps, developed in the 1970s by Stefania Gurba and Franciszek Uhorczak, geographers from the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University.