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.

Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

(Actually no, check that, this year I’m late; and last year I didn’t post one at all except for this stationery guide.)

—I post a gift guide that lists some of the noteworthy books about maps that have been published this year.

(Actually . . . this year not very many books were published. Thanks, pandemic. I’ve had to expand my scope a bit this year.)

If you have a map-obsessed person in your life and would like to give them something map-related—or you are a map-obsessed person and would like your broad hints to have something to link to—this guide may give you some ideas.

Please keep in mind that this is not a list of recommendations: what’s here is mainly what I’ve spotted online, and there’s probably a lot more out there. Also, I haven’t so much as seen most of what’s here, much less reviewed it: these are simply things that, based on what information I have available, seem fit for giving as gifts. (Anyone who tries to parlay this into “recommended by The Map Room” is going to get a very sad look from me.)

This post contains affiliate links; I receive a cut of the purchase price if you make a purchase via these links.

Books

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the publishing industry, and the effects of paper shortages are clear to see on both the publishing schedule and the availability of already published books. The fall publishing season is the season for general-interest map books, and in particular coffee-table map books, which tend to make rather good gifts for the map obsessed. But as far as I can see, books of that sort that have been published in 2021 are few to none—and I can’t say I’m surprised.

That said, the most interesting-looking book to come out this year that would be fit for these purposes is James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti’s Atlas of the Invisible (Particular, £25; W. W. Norton, $40); see my earlier post about the book for more information and links.
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Though I haven’t seen it, or much about it, another book that looks to have some potential is Matt Brown and Rhys B. Davies’s Atlas of Imagined Places (Batsford, £25); trouble is, it appears to be out of stock in most places at the moment.
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

For a list of map books published in 2021 that is as complete as I can make it, see the Map Books of 2021 page. Or see the page for 2020’s books, since for various reasons I wasn’t able to manage a gift guide last year.

World Atlases

World atlases make fine if large gifts, and there are atlases for every price point. The main atlas lines are the National Geographic, the Oxford, and the Times.

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World (Collins, £150) is the more or less undisputed king of atlases, but the Times Atlas line comes in smaller and more affordable editions: from largest to smallest, they are the Comprehensive, the Concise, the Universal, the Reference, the Desktop and the (diminutive!) Mini. Each of these is updated every four years or so: in 2021 it was the turn of the Reference and the Mini; in 2020 it was the Concise; in 2019 it was the Desktop and the Universal; in 2018 it was the Comprehensive. I would have expected to see a new Comprehensive next year, but this year the publisher put out an updated reprint of the 15th edition (changes are outlined here), so who knows. I reviewed the 15th edition three years ago.

The Oxford Atlas of the World (Oxford University Press, $90) which is roughly equivalent in size and price to the Times Concise, is updated every single year—that’s its unique selling proposition. I note too that Oxford University Press also has smaller atlases in its line: the New Concise and Essential atlases were updated in 2021.

• Oxford Atlas of the World, 28th ed. (2021), $90:
  Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• Oxford New Concise World Atlas, 6th ed. (2021), $40:
  Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• Oxford Essential World Atlas, 8th ed. (2021), $25:
  Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

The National Geographic Atlas of the World ($215) comes in one size—large—and its maps are the in the style you expect from National Geographic: if you prefer those to the usual relief maps, this is your atlas. Its most recent edition, the 11th, came out in 2019 (see previous entry). (National Geographic does have other atlases at other price points.)
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Children’s Books

Two children’s atlases were published this year, both with a list price of $15:

• Children’s World Atlas from Arcturus
  Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop
• National Geographic Kids World Atlas, 6th ed.
  Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Last year two children’s books about Marie Tharp were published: see this post from July 2020 for details and links.

The GeoHipster Calendar

The GeoHipster 2022 Calendar ($16) features 14 maps solicited through a call for contributions earlier this year. “Complete with quirky ‘holidays’ and other historical notes designed to pique your geo-curiosity, this is more than your everyday average map calendar!” Lulu

A Swiss Jigsaw Puzzle

Thanks to this tweet from Tom Patterson, I stumbled across this 2,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a relief map of Switzerland (40 CHF). Carta-Media

The LEGO World Map

The LEGO World Map ($250/€250/£230/C$350), in all its 11,695-piece glory, appears to be available at some retailers after being awfully hard to find on launch earlier this year.
Amazon (Canada, UK) | LEGO Store

Wall Prints

For the past year or so Anton Thomas has been working on Wild World, a pictorial map of the natural world (previously). The whole map is expected to be completed next year, but right now Anton is selling limited-edition prints of the map’s Australasian corner in A2 and A3 sizes.

Stationery

If map-themed postcards, notecards and sets of paper and envelopes are your thing—and they certainly are mine—last year I posted a guide to map stationery.

The Leventhal Map Center Has an Online Store

Finally, the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Information Center at the Boston Public Library finally has an online store. Selection is limited—a few catalogues, a map print, coasters and some map stationery—and shipping isn’t quite available yet: you have to pick up your purchases at the Leventhal. But it’s a start.

New map books released in early October include:

The 27th edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World (Oxford University Press); this atlas is updated annually. This edition includes more satellite imagery, a new feature on plastics pollution, and an updated cities section. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

The 14th edition of the Times Concise Atlas of the World (Times Books). One step below the Comprehensive in the Times Atlas range, and a bit more than half the price. Available now in the U.K., next month in Canada, and next March in the United States. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps by Jeremy Black (British Library) “selects 100 of the most revealing, extraordinary and significant maps to give a ground-breaking perspective on the Second World War. It follows the British Library’s enormously successful A History of America in 100 Maps, published in 2018.” Out tomorrow in the U.K.; the U.S. edition is out from the University of Chicago Press later this month. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Philip Parker’s History of World Trade in Maps (Collins), in which “more than 70 maps give a visual representation of the history of World Commerce, accompanied by text which tells the extraordinary story of the merchants, adventurers, middle-men and monarchs who bought, sold, explored and fought in search of profit and power.” Also out now in the U.K. but later in North America. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Finally, the paperback edition of Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library, which I reviewed here in 2018, is out tomorrow from the British Library. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop

Speaking of his ancestor’s legacy, great-grandson, John Eric Bartholomew, told the Evening News that the fact John George Bartholomew is recognised as the man credited with being the first to put the name Antarctica on the map remains a great source of pride.

Little known is that, in 1886, Bartholomew had a brief flirtation with considering the name “Antipodea” for oceanographer John Murray’s map depicting the continent, before settling for Antarctica.

More about John G. Bartholomew at the Bartholomew family’s website and the NLS’s Bartholomew Archive. [WMS]

Previously: Robert G. Bartholomew, 1927-2017.

First, the National Geographic Atlas of the World, a new edition of which comes out every four years. This year’s is the 11th.

I have to confess that I’m fond of the National Geographic: compared to other atlases it does its own thing with political maps that eschew coloured relief and explain every little boundary dispute and controversy in little red letters. It’s also enormous, larger in dimension than the Times Comprehensive (though not as heavy) and with a list price of $215/£170 is slightly more expensive. National Geographic’s page doesn’t go into detail as to what changes were made for the 11th edition, which is a pity. (Does it have Eswatini and North Macedonia, for example?)

The Oxford Atlas of the World is a lot smaller and more affordable. At $90, it slots between the Times Universal and Concise atlases in terms of list price, though its page count is that of the more expensive Concise. It’s also updated every year; this year’s edition is the 26th. And the publisher’s page does list some of the updates. (Eswatini and North Macedonia? Yes!)

As for the Times line of atlases, the most recent to be updated was the third-tier Times Universal Atlas ($50/£80), the 4th edition of which came out in August. Prior to that, the 5th edition of the affordable Times Desktop Atlas ($35/£20) was released in February. The 15th edition of the top-of-range Times Comprehensive Atlas ($200/£150) came out in the fall of 2018: I reviewed it here.

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World (HarperCollins) is the flagship of the Times World Atlas line. (The others, in descending order of size and price, are the Concise, the Universal, the Reference, the Desktop and the Mini.)¹ It’s the latest in a long line of Times atlases, tracing its heritage to the original 1895 atlas published by the Times and the 1922 Times Survey Atlas of the World produced by the venerable Scottish mapmaking firm, John Bartholomew and Son. Like its predecessors, it’s absolutely gargantuan: with the slipcase, it’s 47 × 32.5 cm (16.5 × 12.8 inches) in size and weighs 5.7 kg (12.6 lb). Only the National Geographic Atlas of the World is a little bit larger, and even it weighs less than the Comprehensive (4.5 kg or 9.9 lb).²

The 15th edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas came out on 6 September 2018 (and on 15 November 2018 in North America). HarperCollins has sent me a review copy, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about it.

What can you say, after all, about a big world atlas? It’s a world atlas: it does world atlas things. It has maps of different regions of the world at various scales, plus some informational maps and infographics at the start of the book. It’s awfully big, and needs to be laid flat on a table in order to consult it properly. It’s kind of an anachronism. All of which are true of most world atlases; where they differ is in the details: the physical size of the book, the number of map plates, the scale, the cartographic choices.

On those terms I could compare it to previous editions, which is something I did when I reviewed the ninth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World because I also owned a copy of the eighth. Except in this case I haven’t seen a previous edition: I didn’t own any of the Times atlases before this one turned up. Nor, at £150 a copy, is the Comprehensive something I’d rush out to purchase every time a new edition comes out. (How many of us, having bought a world atlas, replace it at some point? Or buy another, for that matter? Is the first atlas you buy also the last?)

I could also compare it to the competition, except that it’s hard to say what that competition is. The Oxford Atlas of the World is more directly comparable to the smaller Times Concise in terms of physical size and page count. The National Geographic Atlas of the World (the tenth edition of which came out in 2014) is roughly equivalent in terms of size and number of map plates, but it diverges from the world atlas coloured relief map paradigm: it’s the National Geographic map division’s distinctive map style, familiar from a hundred folded maps included in the magazine, applied to a book-shaped object.

Treating a world atlas as a reviewable object on its own terms is going to be a challenge. Let me start by talking about the damn bookmark.

That Damn Bookmark Is Amazing

The 15th edition of the Times Comprehensive doesn’t come with a ribbon marker. (I don’t know if earlier editions did.) What it does come with is this bookmark, which at 42 × 14 cm matches the size of the atlas. It’s absolutely brilliant, because of what it has on the back: a legend. All the map symbols, all the typefaces and font sizes, all the lines and squiggles, explained in one spot.

It’s not like the competition doesn’t do this: both my editions of the Oxford (the 14th) and the National Geographic (the ninth) put this information on the endpapers. But putting it there means having to flip to the front or end of the book to look up a symbol. When you’re dealing with something the size of a world atlas, that’s awfully unwieldy, even with the smaller Oxford.

Probably because it can be consulted more easily (and more often), the legend on the Times Comprehensive’s bookmark is much more detailed. There are different type sizes and symbols for cities depending on their population. Unlike other atlases, these are defined. A city of between one and five million people will appear exactly the same on every map in this atlas (national and administrative capitals are also distinguished by a coloured symbol; national capitals are also in all caps), regardless of where you are on the map. The bookmark is a pledge of consistency.

(The symbols can be fairly hard to tell apart once they’re surrounded by the very busy maps, especially for someone with presbyopic eyes like myself. They’re all circles or squares with dots in them: more differentiation in shapes would be helpful.)

This brings up another point, about the difference between paper and online maps. The recent trend in online maps is to provide information based on context: labels appear and disappear based on your zoom level and your search terms. If you’re browsing—simply poking around the map, not looking for anything in particular—these design choices result in a hot mess. You might be staring at a large metropolitan area and see names of suburbs rather than the name of the conurbation as a whole: no New York or Philadelphia. (Speaking from experience, there.) There’s something to be said, in other words, for consistency, for making editorial choices and sticking with them—even if sticking with them is basically the result of it being on paper more than anything else.

Coverage

Any atlas will emphasize certain regions at the expense of others: it’s a function of the readership its publisher is trying to sell to. As an atlas published in the United Kingdom, in English, the Times Comprehensive does about as you’d expect. Of 132 map plates, 40 are of Europe, comprising 30 percent of the total. Asia is next with 31 plates, or 23.5 percent, followed by North America at 23 plates or 17.4 percent. South America gets only eight plates (six percent), less than the Oceania section (11 plates, 8.3 percent), which makes up Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

Most regional maps run between 1:2,500,000 and 1:5,500,000, depending on the continent; almost all the large-scale maps (1:1,000,000 to 1:1,500,000), with few exceptions, are in Europe. So it’s a bit eurocentric, yes, though the foreword takes pains to emphasize the atlas’s edition-by-edition trend away from eurocentricity.

That’s not to say that the atlas is lacking in detail outside those large-scale maps. Far from it. As a test, I looked for North Sentinel Island, Komodo National Park, and Hans Island: all were present and labelled. (All were also present in the National Geographic; the Oxford had Komodo Island but not the park, and had the best look at North Sentinel Island, in an inset map of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.)

Closer to home (literally!), my own village of Shawville, Quebec does not appear in any of the atlases (though smaller communities nearby do: clearly a conspiracy is afoot).

Controversies

The Times Comprehensive manages cartographic controversies with a bit more subtlety than the National Geographic, which prints explanations in red ink. Disputes involving Crimea, Guyana and Kashmir are noted in black sans-serif text that is easy to miss; Transdnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia do not stand out; Gaza, the West Bank, Somaliland and Western Sahara get the font for disputed territories.

Disputed bodies of water are labelled with a bit of finesse: Sea of Japan (East Sea) and The Gulf (neatly sidestepping whether it’s Arabian or Persian). Parentheses also indicate new, alternative, non-English or deprecated names, e.g. Czechia (Czech Republic), East Timor (Timor-Leste), Swaziland (Eswatini).

Disputed boundaries and ceasefire lines are dotted in several different and specific ways. The Nine-Dash Line is absent; territorial claims are noted on a text label. It’s less informative than the National Geographic (which privileges the political more than any other atlas), but it’s less likely to render the map out of date later on.

Should You Get It?

Which I suspect is the point. It’s fair to say that a world atlas—especially a great big one with a list price of £150 or $200 ($275 in Canada) is meant to be kept for a while. Nobody buying the 15th edition of an atlas has a copy of the 14th lying around: the changes listed in the foreword signal that the atlas is up-to-date and therefore authoritative, not that it’s time to get rid of the old one.

It’s a reference tool, but not in the same way it was before online maps and reference tools were a thing. This is not something to look things up on. A big paper atlas is about browsing and it’s about context: big printed maps allow the eye to wander, to see connections. To stumble across places you weren’t looking for.

It’s useful, but not strictly speaking necessary.

Nor by any means is it for everyone, and not just because of the price. An atlas of this size is probably aimed at libraries and institutions rather than individuals. (Libraries should absolutely get this atlas, as well as several others, if they have the budget for it. That bookmark will disappear fast, though.) For individuals the sheer size of the thing is going to be a problem. As I wrote in my 2010 review of the National Geographic Atlas, “Trying to open up this atlas in your lap, or in your hands standing up, is just asking for it. (And if you think wrangling one atlas is fun, try wrangling two of them at once for the purposes of a review.)” That hasn’t changed. It’s hardly the Klencke Atlas, but you do need a large, clean table to consult this thing. It’s not something you pull casually from the shelf. Again: 12.6 pounds.

But I suspect that the people who would be undaunted and undeterred by such considerations will be found among this website’s readers. You don’t get something like this because you need it; you get it because you want it. A reference tool can also be an object of desire.

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 15th edition
HarperCollins, September 2018
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Today marks the U.K. publication of two atlases in the Times atlas range: the eighth edition of the Times Reference Atlas of the World and the seventh edition of the Times Mini Atlas of the World.

The Reference is right in the middle of the Times atlas range: it’s inexpensive (£30 list, compared to £150 for the Comprehensive, £90 for the Concise and £50 for the Universal) and presumably a bit less unwieldy. The Mini, on the other hand, is positively dainty: at 15.1 × 10.6 cm, it’s smaller than a mass-market paperback! (Obviously the covers above are not to scale; see the somewhat-out-of-date comparison chart for the various atlas sizes.)

According to Amazon, both are available in Canada next month, and in the U.S. in April 2018. (If for some reason you cannot wait, here are direct links to the U.K. store: Reference, Mini.)

Related: Map Books of 2016.

How did Collins Geo allow this to happen? This is the question Mark Monmonier explores in a piece on the New Scientist website. Monmonier, the author of How to Lie with Maps and many other books, argues that hubris was behind the mistake: that the towering reputation of the Times Atlases led to overconfidence.

An explanation lies partly in Collins Geo’s apparent decision to produce the map in house. If that was the case, the firm might have avoided its embarrassment with the obvious quality-assurance step of sending page proofs to carefully chosen experts. Appropriate scientists seldom decline invitations to serve as reviewers. […]

It seems likely there was a belief that external review was unnecessary. Moreover, it seems that none of the publisher’s marketing mavens compared their provocative God’s-eye view with competing treatments on readily accessible scientific websites or Google Earth.

Hubris is not too strong a word to explain HarperCollins’s predicament. A press release promising “concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever” invites critical scrutiny by mainstream climate scientists as well as the self-proclaimed sceptics who are ever eager to pounce on overreaching pronouncements by the former. In Atlasgate, the pro-warming community, which outnumbers naysayers by perhaps 50 to 1, wasted no time in trashing the HarperCollins map.

Previously: Map Books for Fall 2011.