Stunning rare 1930 pictorial map promoting health remedy Eno Fruit Salt & depicting the Sports and Pastimes of Great Britain

Wrapper Title:

The Eno Sports Map of Great Britain Drawn with divers embellishments by Alfred E Taylor

Cartouche Title:

A Map of Gt Britain showing divers Sports and pastimes therein practised…

Original colour-printed map, folding down into brown faux vellum paper wrappers with pictorial title printed in blue and orange to front. The wrappers somewhat soiled and worn with short split to upper fold. The map very fresh and bright and in excellent condition. A very fine example.

A remarkable and exceedingly rare large-scale pictorial map of the British Isles dating from 1930 and promoting Eno Fruit Salt, one of the most popular household health remedies of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

This was the second such map designed by English artist & cartographer, Alfred E Taylor [1887-1959] and followed an equally attractive World map dating from 1925 depicting the global reach & distribution of Eno Fruit Salt.

The richly embellished borders draw their inspiration from late 16th Century Flemish art & engraving and incorporate strapwork panels & roundels interspersed with decorative grotesques featuring cherubs, animals and fruitful vines. The panels & roundels display figures from classical mythology: a group of Amazons and Atlas supporting the Globe on his shoulders feature in the top left and right corners and Atalanta and Hercules in the bottom corners. The additional figures of Diana, Ulysses and Leander in the left border are paired with Terpsichore, Jason and Daedalus in the right.  The Eno’s Brand name and symbolic logo appear top centre with the Eno Company motto – Roman author Martial’s famous epigram: Non est vivere sed valere vita (life is not mere living but the enjoyment of health).

The map itself richly endorses Martial’s words, providing an encyclopaedic gallery of British sports and pastimes through the ages, abounding in amusing vignettes scenes and entertaining references & annotations across the whole of England, Wales and Scotland. Only a small part of Northern Ireland is included. Amongst the numerous literary quotations relating to sports & games, the two most prominent are Roger Ascham’s List of Noble Exercises [1570] which appears in the top border of the map and the detailed list of games from Samuel Rowlands’s The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head-Vaine [1600], which Taylor incorporates into the main title cartouche.

Several fishy encouters around the British coastlines offer further amusement to the viewer and additional opportunities for Taylor to extol the benefits of a regular dose of Eno Fruit Salt:

Said the Skate to the Flounder

You feeble old bounder

What can’t raise a splash

Take Eno’s for beano’s

A jolly good “dash”

And off Portland Bill:

Said the Sole to the Turbot

Why will you take sherbet

Your face is cobalt

Pray take some “Fruit Salt”

A note along the bottom border provides information as to the different prices and formats in which the map was available from J C Eno’s offices in London’s Piccadilly. This basic edition cost just 1 shilling; the more deluxe version, mounted on rollers: 2/6; and the most superior linen-backed version, also mounted on rollers: 5/-, all post free.

We have been able to trace only a couple of examples of this map that have been offered on the market in the last decade, so it is clearly an exceptionally scarce,  ephemeral piece. This is the first example we have ever handled.

In all a delightful pictorial map, undoubtedly one of Taylor’s most attractive & impressive cartographic designs.

We recently researched the life and artistic career of the hitherto little-known Alfred E Taylor, one of Britain’s most talented & prolific early 20th Century book illustrators and mapmakers. You can read more below in our October 2017 Blog post, where this map featured amongst the illustrations.

Refs: Barron Maps Blog