Due to an influx of Christmas "duties", we have only a relatively minor update today:
- courtesy of a private map collector, we have received two rare WIG 1:25,000 maps from the Góry Świętokrzyskie area: Bodzentyn and Nowa Słupia. They are tourist editions, hence the colour.
Courtesy of dr Brendan Whyte from the National Library of Australia, we have received 5 sheets of a rare, Mil-Geo edition of the standard 1:100,000 WW2 map (Grossblatt), plus, from the collection of a digital arm of the Polish National Library “Polona” – another sheet (Krasnystaw) of the same edition. As it happens, some sheets of this edition carry, on their reverse, a town plan, and so is the case with this sheet, hence the German Mil-Geo Stadtplan Lublin (please note the file is 600 dpi and will, most likely NOT open in web browsers, you need to download it instead!).
Christmas is upon us, so we wish you all a quiet Christmas.

New maps available from the Uniwersytet  ÅšlÄ…ski:

- several German 1:25,000 Messtischblatt (Topographische Karte) sheets,
- Russian 1:126,000 maps (3-verst)
- several Russian 1:84,000 maps (2-verst)
- two, very rare Russian 1:21,000 maps (half-verst)
- a few Russian version of an Austro-Hungarian 1:75,000 maps
- several Soviet 1:50,000 maps, dated 1944-45,
- a few Soviet 1:100,000 maps, dated 1944-45
- several German WW2 maps from USSR, scale 1:100 000, dated 1941 - 1942 (Russland 1:100 000), single sheets, double sheets and quadruple sheets
- approx.. 20 sheets of the map Austro-Hungarian 1:25,000 maps
- a few sheets by WIG, same scale, based on the Austrian maps
- one sheet of a 1: 1mln map (Wilno) dated 1928 r, a part of a Map series "International Map of the World 1:1 000 000”
- Another interesting and rare Polish map in 1:25 000, approx. 1920, "Dawidów – Bóbrka",
- A joint edition of 4 sheets, 1:25,000 originally produced by WIG in 1930s: Mikulczyce – Bytom – Gliwice – Chorzów. With no publication date it's hard to confirm if they are an original, pre-WW2 edition, or a temporary re-print for local use done in late 1940s, i.e. after the war.

We have managed to locate and make available for the "literature" section the original of the WIG maps from 1929 „Przepisy podstawowe o sporzadzaniu map…” (core instructions on WIG maps), which provide a descriptive specification sheet for basic WIG map series.
Courtesy of Mr Ryszard Hubisz we have also made available a map and a brochure by a known Polish cartographer, Franciszek Uhorczak, „Skorowidz nazw gromad, miast i miasteczek… woj. lwowskiego, stanislawskiego i tarnopolskiego” (Gazetteer). The gazetteer comes with a large map, which ca be downloaded from Mapster.
We have also added a German brochure dated July 1939 including a set of "drive-through" town plans of Poland („Stadt-Durchfahrten in Polen und Danzig (Skizzen)”

We are very grateful for the permission and fantastic support we received over this summer from the staff at the Geoscience Faculty of the  Uniwersyt Śląski with scanning a large number of historical maps in their collection. It is going to take some time to process all the material, so we will release it in batches, as soon as new maps and plans become available. For now:
- approx. 40 new town plans, including showing the town of Cieszyn on the Polish-Czech border. Other plans can be found in the following sub-categories:
Town plans of central Europe
Town plans of GOP (Upper Silesian Industrial Region)
Other plans (Strasbourg in France)

- Several WIG 1:25,000, maps, both Polish and German editions
- Several German 1:100,000, joint editions, so-called Grossblatt / Einheitsblatt), particularly interesting a Mil.-Geo edition of Grossblatt Nr 386 Łuck from June 1944.
- several sheets of the German 1:300 000 (Ãœbersichtskarte von Mitteleuropa, Osteuropa) across the whole continent

Please note: most maps have been scanned at 600 dpi, some files, particularly large-format sheets such as Grossblatt editions, might be up to 100 Mb.

A technical issue: we are aware of a problem with our website en-coding, which now defaults to ISO-8859-1. The effect, in plain English, is that some characters are replaced with illegible garbage which makes it hard or impossible to read some portions of the text. We are working to fix this issue.

Thanks to the hard work of our colleagues from the easteurotopo.org we have added new Russian and Soviet 1:84,000 maps, so-called "2-verst map", courtesy of the Library of Congress. 231 new sheets provides more thorough coverage of, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.
We do not expect to receive more sheets of this map type by end of summer 2015, but we should be able to add other Russian maps, of various scale.

Courtesy of the Earth Museum in Warsaw, Poland, we have added about 100 sheets from a map collection called Geological Atlas of Galicia (Atlas Geologiczny Galicji), which were produced between 1880s and early 1900. Index sheets presenting the stages of this long-term project can be found at the bottom of the map list. The maps are based on the Austrian 1:75,000 "Spezialkarte". There are approx. 30 sheets still missing, but over the next few weeks we should be able to add most of them from other sources.

We have received, from the collection of the Uniwersity of Illinois Library several sheets of a rare, German 1:50,000 map (Deutsche Karte), covering, in a crescent shape, some areas of western Poland. All sheets have been scanned at 400 dpi resolution. Please note, that while we have received a permission to use the scans for non-commercial purposes on the Internet, the university imposes certain restriction, i.e. licencing fees on some use of the materials, e.g. in publications. The list of these fees is available in the pdf document and can also be found in the each file's "datasheet" on Mapster.