London-based publisher Blue Crow Media has begun issuing a series of cartographic guides to urban architecture. They sent me samples of their first two maps, the Art Deco London Map and the Brutalist London Map. (A bilingual Constructivist Moscow Map came out this week, and a Brutalist Washington Map is coming in October.)

Each is a folded paper map of London, 42 × 60 cm in size, that highlights more than 50 examples of Art Deco or Brutalist architecture, respectively, found in that city. On the front side is the map itself, where the architectural examples, highlighted in red, pop out against an extremely spare base layer that has no text except for parks and Tube stations; streets are unlabelled. The end result is dramatic and clear—the grey-on-black Art Deco map is particularly striking—but presupposes a familiarity with the landscape (or a smartphone); these maps really can’t be used on their own to find things. They’d look awfully good on a wall, though. These are simple, well-designed maps that make a virtue of simplicity. They cost £8 each (or two for £14.50).

Cavallini and Company is a stationery and gifts company that uses vintage imagery from the 19th and 20th centuries in its products, including botanical drawings, travel posters—and maps. There are map calendars, file folders, pencil cases, notebooks, magnets and wrapping papers, among many other items. You’ll often find them in stationery and map stores.

This month I decided to participate (at least a little) in A Month of Letters, and for that I needed to restock my stationery supply. Since I’m known to have a thing about maps, I figured I’d try out two of Cavallini’s products: their vintage map postcards and their vintage map stickers. Both come in metal tins that feel retro in and of themselves.

The postcards come eighteen to a tin, two each of nine designs. Four are maps of the world (two Mercators, a Van der Grinten and a Herschel—which seems to be a variant of the Lambert conformal conic). The remaining maps are of Italy, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal, and Europe. Most of the maps date from the interwar period (i.e., between the First and Second World Wars), though one of the world maps is pre-World War I and the map of Italy uses post-World War II boundaries.

The postcards are printed on heavy card stock, which seems durable enough, but a couple of them had some slight foxing around the edges. The finish is non-glossy, which means ink will at least stick to the card: I had very little smudging when I wrote on them with a fountain pen this afternoon.

The stickers are of similar design and origin. They’re self-adhesive. One tin contains twenty-four sheets, three of each kind, with anywhere from two to twenty stickers per sheet. City and country insets are a recurring theme, as though each sticker is meant to highlight a specific location. Which suggests their intended use.

Both products have a thoroughly retro affect, but then again so does sending correspondence by post. It’s a good fit.

Buy Vintage Map Postcards at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Buy Vintage Map Stickers at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Search for Cavallini & Co. map products at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World was a landmark in historical cartography: an atlas that pinpointed locations from classical antiquity on modern maps. The result of more than a decade’s work and $4.5 million in funding support (here’s the project website), the print version of the Barrington Atlas, which came out in 2000, was both enormous and expensive: larger than either the National Geographic or Times Comprehensive atlases,¹ and priced at an eye-popping $395.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s an iPad version of the Barrington Atlas, which (they say) contains the full content of the $395 print atlas and costs only $20 (iTunes link). On that basis it’s a no-brainer: $20 is better than $395. (95 percent off!) Classicists with iPads who don’t buy this app have something wrong with them. But how does it work as a map app?

How do you create an iPad version of an existing print atlas? If you’re the National Geographic Society, with a century or more of cartography behind it, you’re more than able to put out a $2 app that includes several levels of map detail and can be panned and zoomed to your heart’s content. But if you’re the Barrington Atlas, you don’t have the same resources.

So what you end up with in the Barrington Atlas app are high-resolution versions of the original maps from the print version. These maps—which are marvellous, by the way—used the Lambert conformal conic projection: stitching them together to form a seamless single map would be a major effort, all the more considering that the maps were produced in the 1990s using Illustrator 6 on early PowerPC Macintoshes (the iPads on which this app runs are much more powerful computers). Instead, you browse the individual maps in a Cover Flow-style interface.

That’s not to say that the app is completely uninteractive. Pressing the compass button shows you the adjacent maps, so you can explore after a fashion.

Pressing the key button opens up the legend.

Navigation is also facilitated by the Locator tab, which allows you to select individual maps from the key map interface, below. (This also shows the Barrington Atlas‘s coverage: I bet you weren’t expecting it to include Tibet.)

All things considered, it’s a reasonable approach to presenting the information without having to start from scratch, particularly for an app that will not have a broad audience.

That said, I did find a few interface problems: page-turning was slow and sometimes unreliable (tapping worked better than dragging), and the Cover Flow browsing was a bit blocky. It crashed on me once or twice. I tested this app on a new iPad Air; I wonder how well it runs on an iPad 2, which is the minimum hardware required. And the app doesn’t save state: it doesn’t remember what page of the Introduction you were reading or what map you were consulting; reopening the app starts from scratch.

Not that these are deal-breakers—not for this kind of app. It works well enough, at least on top-of-the-line hardware, that those with an interest in this subject should be able to lay down their $20 without much hesitation. It beats $395, after all.

In 2007 Eddie Jabbour released the KickMap, a map of the New York subway system that tried to square the circle of various competing and controversial New York subway map designs. The KickMap later became an iOS app; I reviewed the iPad version in 2010. Now Eddie reports that he’s released a KickMap for the London Underground—not satisfied with updating Massimo Vignelli, he’s going after Harry Beck.

[W]hile the Tube Map’s updates over the decades have attempted to follow Beck’s design, a glance at the current iteration reveals that his design heirs have failed to retain his core credo of clarity and ease of use. Ongoing expansion of the Underground, the addition of the new Overground system, and essential disability access information have made most modern Tube Maps, both official and independent, overly complex and difficult to read. … [I]nstead of redesigning the entire map vocabulary as we did for KickMap NYC, we embarked on a fresh new effort to recapture Beck’s clarity and ease of use.

A regular Underground user would be able to evaluate whether the map succeeds in its goal to improve the Tube map’s clarity; I haven’t even so much as been to London, much less taken the Tube. But I’ve downloaded the app (disclosure: I received a promo code) and have played around with it a bit.

What I can say is that the map is gorgeous and scrolls fluidly (at least on an iPhone 5). In a nice touch, it adds detail like neighbourhoods and landmarks only when zoomed in, preserving a simpler, less cluttered map when zoomed out.

Those of you who’ve used the New York KickMap will find much that is familiar. While it can use your iPhone’s GPS to locate the nearest station—a nice touch on a non-geographic map—it does lack the New York app’s Directions function, which can route you between two stations on the network. Something to ask for, I think, in an update.

It costs only £0.69/$0.99 and is a universal iPhone/iPad app. iTunes link.

You should know what you’re getting when you buy this. It’s not an atlas. It’s not even a book. George himself describes it as “a book-shaped box containing a whole bunch of gorgeous, glossy, fold-out maps of Westeros, Essos, and the lands and seas from A Song of Ice and Fire.” There is no text other than on a single-page introduction.

Open the box and you see two sleeves containing six maps apiece. Each map is 24 by 30 inches, single sided, in full colour, and on glossy paper, the kind you can see your fingerprints on. As fantasy maps go, this is a lavish production—a long way from the two-colour atlases we’ve seen for other imaginary worlds. (Some Amazon reviewers have expressed concern about wear and tear from folding and unfolding the maps; bear that in mind.)

I don’t think anything has been done like this before; maps of Middle-earth have been sold at bookstores in cardboard containers, and I’m told that in 1980 there were maps of the Star Trek universe done in a similar fashion, but I don’t think anything approximating this has ever been done for an imagined universe anywhere else. (If it has, please send me a copy immediately.)

Roberts’s maps execute the standard fantasy map design language, but in full colour, with more shades of green (for plains and forests) and white (for ice) than I was anticipating. (I guess I was expecting faded parchment.) I’m fairly certain these were produced (or at least coloured and lettered) digitally, and Roberts has achieved a good overall effect. (Though the cliffs don’t necessarily have the right perspective view compared with other parts of the shoreline.) These maps are competently executed, but not groundbreaking.

The maps are as follows: The Known World; The West; Central Essos; The East; Westeros; Beyond the Wall; The Free Cities; Slaver’s Bay; The Dothraki Sea; King’s Landing (a city map); Braavos (another city map); and Journeys (which shows characters’ travels). There is quite a bit of overlap: many areas (e.g. Westeros) show up in several maps at several scales.

The maps are almost too big. Unwieldy, even. You need a lot of table space to look at a two-foot-by-three-foot map. An atlas would have been easier to use—to browse, to flip through.

A surprising lack of detail exacerbates their size: it’s amazing how empty these maps look (and not just the maps showing the Dothraki Sea, though central Essos is practically blank). But compared with the endpaper maps in A Dance with Dragons, these maps show the exact same amount of detail. Make the maps bigger, and features and lettering are reduced in relative size: the maps look emptier. And endpaper maps are also high-contrast, rendered in black and white, whereas on these maps, hills, plains and forests are painted in the Photoshop equivalent of watercolours, and simply fade into the background.

If the small-scale maps show just as much detail, the middle-scale, regional maps are somewhat redundant. For my money, the Known World and Journeys maps are just the right scale for the size. Conversely, the most interesting maps to look at are the ones that are the most cluttered and the largest in scale: the city maps of King’s Landing and Braavos.

My partner Jennifer, who’s actually read the books (and whose observations about these maps helped me write this review) says she could spend a lot of time studying the Journeys map; unfortunately, this map more than any other will be obsoleted by forthcoming books. It would have been nice to have seen more thematic maps like this, but that’s the sort of thing you’d get from an atlas.

These maps are noteworthy for their unusual presentation, large size, and high production values, but on balance they’re a bit of a disappointment, largely because their unusual presentation and large size aren’t always a good thing.

Buy at Amazon | publisher’s page

Previously: Now Out: The Lands of Ice and Fire; The Lands of Ice and Fire: Westeros Atlas Coming in October.

Those seeking a true alternative to Apple’s (or Google’s) maps will probably be disappointed. It’s a perfectly serviceable portal to the Nokia’s map platform, but there’s nothing to ooh or aah over. Nokia’s maps aren’t necessarily better; as with all map platforms—Google’s, Apple’s, OpenStreetMap’s and Nokia’s—whose is better varies from place to place. For my little village, for example, Nokia’s street data is a bit better than Apple’s, and it has more POIs; on the other hand, some of Nokia’s POIs are misplaced, and Apple has better, higher-resolution imagery for my area. Again, it depends on where you are.

I’m not a fan of Here Maps’s UI: it’s rather clunky and appears to be designed to be the same across all platforms, rather than using native iOS widgetry. It seems better matched to the iPhone/iPod touch than to the iPad, where the non-native popup windows swallow too much of the screen. The map tiles are bitmapped rather than vector images, and load more slowly than I’d expect. To be sure, there is an offline mode, and a few other features I haven’t explored yet—see Cult of Mac, Macworld and TUAW for more thorough looks at this app. My first impression is kind of meh: it’s good to have multiple map apps, but this one doesn’t really stand out. But it’s free, so it can’t hurt to try it.