User:Rein Deer/sandbox

The Map House was founded in 1907 by Alfred Sifton and Francis Praed as a book and map publisher and seller. Sifton Praed & Co Ltd, trading as The Map House, was based at 67 St James’s Street in London.

The Map House soon became a familiar land-mark in its own right and was one of the fixtures that trainee taxi drivers had to know if they were to pass “The Knowledge” and become an official London cabby. Daphne du Maurier even included the Map House as the setting for a crucial plot twist in her collection “The Birds & Other Stories”, “I had gone into the Map House, in St James’s to buy myself some half-dozen books to read on that long thrash across the Atlantic – a journey one took with certain qualms in those days, the Titanic tragedy still fresh in memory – and there were Victor and Anna, poring over maps, which they had spread out over every available space”.

The Map House supplied maps to travelers, explorers, colonial administrators and all branches of the armed services. including maps of Antarctica to Ernest Shackleton and maps of the Far East to Winston Churchill. In 1920 The Map House received a Royal Warrant from the Prince of Wales, for supplying the future Edward VIII with maps of the Western Front during the Great War.

As Official licensed distributor of the maps for the War Office during both the First and Second World Wars, the Map House was not only instrumental in the distribution of maps detailing the ongoing conflict but also played a part in publishing and distribution of propaganda maps such as those illustrated in this book.

In the early 1970s Sifton Praed ceased to publish or print any more maps and books and continued its transformation into one of the first dedicated antiquarian map shops. After nearly seventy years in St James's, the Map House moved to its present position at 54 Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge in 1973.