A new book collects rare images from the short-lived golden age of pictorial mapping.

Map-making isn’t always serious business. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, many U.S. artists embraced a form of cartography that swapped careful measurements and accurately rendered geography for a more whimsical mode of wayfinding: the pictorial map. Inspired in part by the sea-monster-filled maps of medieval Europe, these colorful, bright maps—often used for commercial advertising—illustrated outsized renderings of iconic architecture, major industries, tourist destinations, and folklore rather than simply streets and topography.

Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, a new book by geographer Stephen Hornsby, collects 158 of these charming visuals, largely drawing on the Library of Congress’s extensive collection. “Because contemporary curators and librarians generally did not consider pictorial maps ‘geographic’ or ‘scientific,’ most libraries did not collect them and they are quite rare today,” as Ralph Ehrenberg, who heads the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, writes in the book’s introduction. Though the first real pictorial map depicted the London Underground, artists and cartographers across the pond embraced the style wholeheartedly, forming what Ehrenberg calls “a uniquely American art form.”

Here are nine delightful, weird, informative maps from Picturing America: