Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, many believed California was a remote island with plenty of gold, free-loving amazons, and strange beasts.

A new exhibit at Cal State Fullerton’s Pollak Library features a selection of maps from the Roy V. Boswell Collection for the History of Cartography, one of the University’s special collections. The exhibit, “California As an Island and Worlds That Never Were,” will be on display Jan. 22 to March 29 in the Salz-Pollak Atrium Gallery.

The collection was established in 1971 by CSUF founding librarian Ernest W. Toy and Roy V. Boswell, a rare book and antiquarian map authority. The collection reached its present size of more than 1,500 maps by 1985 — all of which have been recently digitized and added to the University’s repository.  Check it out!