This rare, unfinished map by Mora was never published during his lifetime, and was printed in a numbered edition of only 40 copies in November 2007, several years after it was discovered. As explained by the Jo Mora Trust: "The original drawing is part of the Jo Mora Trust and was in the collection of Jo Mora's son, Jo Jr. Several years ago it was uncovered, somewhat crumpled, in Jo Mora Jr.'s storage room by Terry Ahlberg while he was looking over old Mora items with Jo Jr. It was an unfamiliar piece to both, and now it has come to the public through the Jo Mora Trust. One is left to speculate as to what extent the carte was finished, certainly there is room for more information, but we will never know Jo Mora's final intention."

This uncolored map showcases the "romance of the past" and "glamour of the present" of Santa Catalina island, a popular tourist destination for southern Californians. The landscape is filled with cartoonish images of hunters, hikers, animals, and film crews. Several dozen films were shot on Catalina during the 1920's-1930's, including The Vanishing American, a Western movie for which 14 bison were brought to the island and then abandoned after the filming wrapped. These bison, as well as other animals non-native to the island are illustrated on the map, including wild boar, mountain goats, and deer. A large bird's-eye plan of the city of Avalon fills the bottom corner and medallions sporting some of the favorite activities on the island fill the surrounding waters. At top is a brief, illustrated history of Santa Catalina, ending with William Wrigley, Jr., who purchased the island in 1919 and to whom Mora dedicates the map.

Joseph ("Jo") Jacinto Mora was born in Uruguay in 1876 and moved the following year with his family to the eastern United States. He showed an early aptitude for the arts and began illustrating for newspapers and children's books in his twenties. Mora was fascinated with the American West, and after working on cattle ranches in Texas and Mexico as a young adult, he moved permanently out west in 1903. He spent his time learning about old Spanish vaqueros, American cowboys, and the Hopi and Navajo tribes, subjects which became lifelong passions and the focus of much of his work. His paintings and photographs of the Hopi were memorialized into a traveling exhibit for the Smithsonian Institution in 1979.

Mora was an artist with many talents, including drawing, painting, illustration, sculpture, photography, writing, and mapmaking. His artistic skills were perhaps unsurprising, as his father was a noted sculptor, and Jo Mora on occasion helped his father on sculpting commissions, including the facade of the Native Sons of the Golden West Building in San Francisco. His foray into mapmaking began later in his career while he was residing in Pebble Beach, California, where he would spend the last 27 years of his life. Mora's first map was of the Monterey peninsula, entitled California's Playground, and was commissioned by the Del Monte Hotel to commemorate the hotel's grand reopening in 1926. The map combined historical facts with whimsical illustrations, cartographic points of interest, cartoonish figures, and witty notations. And thus was born Mora's unique style that is common on all of his "cartes," a term that he used for his cartographic works. Although Mora only created about a dozen maps in his career, Stephen J. Hornsby contends that "His maps formed the most important collection of pictorial cartography done by any artist of one particular region of the United States" (Hornsby, p. 29).

Provenance: Jo Mora Trust. The map is accompanied by a letter certifying that this is #37 of 40 printed editions, signed by Peter Hiller, Jo Mora Trust Collection Curator.

References: Hornsby (Picturing America) pp. 28-31; Rumsey #8562.

Condition: A+

Crisp and clean.