Cartographic relief presentation is now available from Esri Press

By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead

Eduard Imhof’s Cartographic Relief Presentation is now available from Esri Press.

Many of us have been anxiously waiting for this book to be re-released for quite some time as Cartographic Relief Presentation is a very hard book to find – you can only rarely find a copy for sale and it has a habit of being stolen off library shelves. If you do find it for sale, it is usually at an asking price of over $300, and if you don’t read German, you have to hope that you are lucky enough to find a copy of the English translation. (The original 1965 German language version, Kartographische Geländedarstellung, was translated into English in 1982 but with only a limited press run.) The great news is that you can now get a copy of your own because Esri Press has re-published the English version.

This is also a book that many cartographers have used as the definitive reference for the proper methods to depict relief, including hillshading, hypsometric tinting, and various methods of contouring. In fact for a long while I kept getting requests to write up quite a few of the techniques Imhof describes and so I suggested that the Esri Press inquire about the possibility of re-publishing this book. A lot of people at Esri were responsible for making this happen — kudos to the Esri Press Team for making this book something we can get again!