The pair of paperweights illustrated on the front cover of this issue of Polar Record and reproduced as Fig. 1 were made in 1889 at the Burslem pottery of James Macintyre & Co. (best known for employing William Moorcroft a few years later) using maps engraved by the Edinburgh firm of J.G. Bartholomew (JGB). Macintyre produced other paperweights with Bartholomew maps of Central Africa, India, British South Africa and the rarest, Australasia, to a pottery design 9.9cm in diameter, weight 333gm, registered as No.141265. The correspondence shows that the hemispheres came first, and were intended to feature the British Empire worldwide, although that political appellation does not appear.

The paperweights have a dual significance for Antarctic history. First, as previously mentioned (Bulkeley Reference Bulkeley2015), they were only the third published map to use the name ‘Antarctica’, and only the second to use it as a legend within the map. They are different in several ways from the only previous such map, published by JGB's father John Bartholomew Jr. in 1887 (Woodburn Reference Woodburn2008). The paperweights map uses a more emphatically dotted line to draw a shape which is closer to that conjectured by Heinrich Berghaus in the 1840s (also usually on two hemispheres) than to the vague outline published by JGB's father just two years earlier.

The second Antarctic aspect of the paperweights is that, whereas British navigators including Bransfield (1820), Biscoe (1832) and Ross (1841) had made inchoate claims to portions of Antarctica on behalf of the British crown, the western hemisphere map created by JGB in 1889 took the next step, by treating such claims as if they had been perfected. Customers could pay for different amounts of tinting added to transfers taken from the engravings. Some have no colour added; in others only the sea is coloured. The empire is less visible in those examples. In this fully coloured version, however, Victoria Land and a poorly located Graham Land (detail) are just as much British possessions as the Kermadec Islands, formally annexed in January 1887. As early as 1868 JGB's father had published an empire map which showed Victoria Land, the Balleny Islands and Enderby Land as British possessions, daubed a provocative red smudge across an unnamed Wilkes Land, and added ‘Kerguelen's Land’ into the bargain. But in 1868 Graham Land and the South Shetlands, though shown, were not included in the empire, one foreign discovery, Adelie Land, was shown, and there was no outline of an Antarctic continent to draw the parts together (Bartholomew Reference Bartholomew1868: Sheet 1). By 1889, although Wilkes Land was shown and not claimed, the overall possessive political impression created by the paperweights map was clearer and stronger, as British geographers became steadily more confident that Antarctica existed.