Alexander Gross, New War Map of the Western Front (?1939)

There's no date on this, but I'm assuming it was produced right at the beginning of the war. In part this is because no battles are marked on it, but mostly because it's a map of entirely the wrong bit of the western front.

I'm sorry that the image isn't more detailed, or larger. That black line running along the bottom-left is the Maginot Line; the grey-hatched area running roughly parallel to it is the Seigfried Line, whereupon British Troops had aspirations to hang out their washing, assuming both that their mother-dear possessed any dirty washing, and also upon the eventuality of the Seigfried Line still being there. Otherwise the map runs from Metz in the West to Karlsruhe in the East, with splendid attention to detail of towns, villages, forests and the like. In the event 'a decoy German force sat opposite the Line while a second Army Group cut through the Low Countries of Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as through the Ardennes Forest which lay north of the main French defences' [as Wikipedia says]. What we have, in other words, is a kind of eerie alt-historical WWII. The cover boasts 'the actual fighting area'; and evidently planners expected this location to be precisely that. It wasn't; although I wonder what the war would have looked like if it had been. Counterfactastic.

Gross (1879-1958) was a prolific mapmaker and topographical artist; the author of the once-standard Daily Telegraph Victory Atlas of the World (1920). Although why the John Hopkins Library didn't send their copy of this book to, of all places, Moravia -- well that's a puzzle too puzzling for me.