I read a number of blogs about water. One I read with more frequency than others is On the Public Record (OtPR). I’ve been reading it since I saw it in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The writer is credible, smart, thorough, and possesses a style that makes for entertaining reading. At least for me.
One item mentioned in the LAT article was The California Water Atlas. OtPR mentions it in response to a reader looking for background material on California water. “All the cool kids have one. Don’t know if it has information you couldn’t find online these days, but having one in your office is part of the secret handshake.” I decided I wanted one but it took me a couple years (and seeing a citation of it in an Edward Tufte book) to get around to buying one on eBay. I think I paid $80 for it. But it cost $39.86 (plus $2.39 in sales tax for California residents) in 1980. That works out to about $130 today, according to the first inflation calculator I found online. So I guess I got a deal.
However, you don’t have to spend anything for a virtual copy. It’s available as a .pdf from the David Rumsey Map Collection and it’s worth downloading the big version (180MB). I don’t know how much of the material is still current, but it’s worth having for a couple reasons. One is that it’s impressive that a state agency would undertake a publication like this, and for another it’s probably the best example of graphic literacy in a book that I’ve ever seen. In an article in the Jan/Feb 1980 Sierra by Marc Reisner (which I found tucked into my copy of the atlas) he said, “Some of the graphics convey at a careful glance what whole books do not teach.” If people built their presentations this way PowerPoint wouldn’t have such a bad reputation.
The book itself needs a pretty large coffee table to be a coffee table book. It’s almost 19″ tall and over 32″ wide when open. That only makes the content more impressive, though. And if having a larger table and a deeper shelf is all I need to be one of the “cool kids”, that’s something that I can do.