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

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.

Maphead by Ken Jennings (Simon & Schuster, September 2011. ISBN 978-1439167175). Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings’s book about map nerdery, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, came out last month. Seth Stevenson reviewed it for Slate: “His sprightly, good-natured memoir combines light introspection, rafts of geographic trivia, and admiring profiles of fellow map obsessives. Along the way, Jennings weaves in musings on the importance of maps as cultural artifacts–be they yellowed scrolls with hand-drawn sea monsters or satellite snapshots that can geolocate single blades of grass.” Excerpts are available on Jennings’s website.
Amazon | Publisher

(Previously: Ken Jennings’s Map Book Is Coming in September; Ken Jennings Is Writing a Map Book.)

Maps by Paula Scher (Princeton Architectural Press, November 2011. ISBN 9781616890339). Princeton Architectural Press has published a number of excellent map art books lately, including Katharine Harmon’s You Are Here and The Map as Art and Kris Harzinski’s collection of hand-drawn maps, From Here to There (my review). In November they’re publishing Maps, a hardcover book reproducing artist Paula Scher’s large-scale map paintings, created between 1998 and 2010. Samples are available on Scher’s website. Via @TAGFineArts.
Amazon | Publisher

(Previously: New Paula Scher Exhibition; Paula Scher: The Maps.)

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 13th edition (Times Books, September 2011. ISBN 978-0-00-741913-5). Normally the publication of a new edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, thought by many to be the gold standard of world atlases, wouldn’t ruffle too many feathers. But the atlas’s publishers got into trouble when scientists challenged the claim that Greenland had lost 15 percent of its permanent ice cover — a loss dramatically apparent in the atlas’s map of the island. But, as BBC News shows, the map is not consistent with satellite observations. The publishers have apologized for the 15 percent statement, which was in the press release but not the atlas itself, and is now reviewing the map of Greenland itself; see their clarification. See also GIS Lounge. Amazon | Publisher

The Times Atlas of London (Times Books, October 2011. ISBN 978-0-00-743422-0). Arriving this month in the U.K., and presumably with much less controversy, The Times Atlas of London, which the publisher describes as an “[a]uthoritative and prestigious atlas with detailed mapping and photographs for the whole of Greater London. Fully up-to-date reference maps, statistics, images and historical mapping give an exceptionally detailed view of London helping you explore this great city.” The Times Atlas of London also comes to Canada in November and Australia in December, but not the United States. Amazon | Publisher

The Times Mapping the Railways by Julian Holland and David Spaven (Times Books, September 2011. ISBN 978-0-00-743599-9). For those interested in railway maps, there is now a book out that is for once not by Mark Ovenden. Also from Times Books, the awkwardly titled Times Mapping the Railways is, from what I can gather, a history of British railways told through maps — more than a hundred of them according to the publisher’s materials. It’s out in Britain now, Australia in October and Canada in November; like The Times Atlas of London, short of ordering from a British or Commonwealth book shop, it’s unavailable in the United States. Amazon | Publisher

London Map Book. The London Mapping Festival has announced that they’re planning to publish a map book in time for Christmas; presumably we’ll have more details soon. Via @bcsweb.