The 16th edition of the granddaddy of world atlases, the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, is out this fall. It was published last month in the U.K. (on 12 October) and will ship in North American next month (on 12 December). It comes five years after the publication of the 15th edition (my review of that edition is something I’m still rather proud of). As with everything else, the price has gone up a bit, edition to edition: £175 in the U.K. (up from £150 for the 15th), $260 in the U.S. (up from $200) and $285 in Canada (up from $275).
Some of the changes since that 15th edition are listed on the publisher’s page, and a lot of them deal with updating place names:
- New country names for Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)1 and North Macedonia (previously the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia)
- More than 8000 place name changes with names comprehensively updated in Kazakhstan and Ukraine
- Addition of Māori names in New Zealand and restored indigenous names in Australia, the most notable being the renaming of Fraser Island in Queensland to its Butchulla name K’gari
- Administrative boundary updates in Ethiopia, Mali and Kazakhstan
- Added road, railway and airport infrastructure across the globe including the 4km-long Dardanelles Bridge (Turkey), the Fehmarn Belt road/rail tunnel alignment (Germany/Denmark) and the Sandoy Tunnel (Faroe Islands)
Each round of Times atlases has its own cover design language: from this Comprehensive and next year’s announced Desktop we can see that this round of atlases combines dark relief backgrounds with bright title and spine colours. Neon green is an unexpected choice for the Comprehensive, especially given how restrained the 15th was. I wonder what the bookmark looks like.