Best Selling Texas Souvenir of All Time
A humorous 1940s pictorial map of North America, from a Texan point of view. Texas takes up most of the continent on the map, with every local feature being equally exaggerated. In 1944 John Randolph published a small booklet entitled, Texas Brags. The booklet, which was later turned into a large-scale pictorial map, contained fun facts and local wisdom, such as, “Son, it is very rude to ask a man where he is from. If he is from Texas, you will find it out, and if he’s not, don’t embarrass him”. It is unclear who exactly started the trend, but in the middle of the 20th century humorously exaggerated maps became very popular all over the country: ‘A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America’, ‘Map of the United States as Californians See It’, etc. Skillfully drawn by Mark Storm, the Bragging Texas is the only one, however, to successfully cover almost the entire continent of North America, annexing it culturally as well: Hudson Bay is renamed “Houston Bay”, Mexico is “Old Mexico”, and the Baja California Peninsula becomes “El Paso Peninsula”, to name just a few. Randolph and Storm’s beautiful decorative map is peppered with illustrations of Texas-related jokes — the tomatoes being the size of bean bag chairs, the longhorn’s horns appearing to have the span of an airplane, the “true” location of the North Pole being 36 miles North of Amarillo, etc. “Texas Brags” eventually became the best selling Texas souvenir of all time.
• Official Texas Brags Map of North America, John Randolph (writer) & Mark Storm (illustrator)
• Fine Art Premium Giclée (Gouttelette) Print (100% cotton 340 gsm fine art paper)
• Made in USA (sadly, not in Texas)