The clock system was an attempt to solve a specific problem: well into the 20th century, farmhouses in the United States lacked proper addresses. Without a street number or even a street name, navigating to a given farmhouse could be a real challenge. Plato’s solution, invented while he was trying his hand at farming in Colorado, was to assign each farmhouse an identifier based on its clock position, with the clock centred on the nearest town. The clock system saw its greatest uptake in upstate New York, where Plato relocated shortly thereafter and started his business selling the maps and directories based on his system. In a marketing turn worthy of Phyllis Pearsall, Plato cultivated his previous status as a farmer, citing as his inspiration a sale lost because his buyer couldn’t find his house.

It’s tempting to think of the clock system as the what3words of a century ago: a proprietary navigational aid promising to make wayfinding simpler. And apart from the considerable curiousity value of an obsolete but unusual (and therefore interesting) system, the story of Plato and his system is pure American hustle: the rise and fall of a business from patent to product to collapse in the face of the Great Depression, to an unsuccessful attempt at restarting in Ohio. The indefatigable Plato even persisted with his system while working for the federal government in various capacities during the 1930s. Meanwhile, after Plato’s patent had expired, a modified compass system—using compass points rather than hours on a clock face—persisted in upstate New York until 1940.

Apart from his system, and the maps and ephemera it produced, Plato left few traces in the historical record, which makes him a challenging subject for a biographer. Monmonier gamely reconstructs what he can from patent filings, tax rolls, employment records and news coverage. Lacking more verbose evidence, Monmonier even resorts to producing maps of Plato’s life from those records, which seems appropriate given the subject matter and even helps illuminate several points. The end result is necessarily fragmentary and inductive, but a portrait of Plato nevertheless manages to emerge: a restless man who after dabbling in many things, changing gears and relocating many times, hit upon an idea that was kind of neat and tried to ride it for all it was worth.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher.

Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address
by Mark Monmonier
University of Iowa Press, 12 Apr 2022
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Charles Blow was once in charge of the New York Times graphics department, and an art director at National Geographic. His response to Trump’s marked-up map was “visceral”:

Because of this unyielding commitment to accuracy, I believe cartography enjoys an enviable position of credibility and confidence among the people who see it. If you see it mapped, you believe.

That is precisely what you want the case to be, particularly in natural disasters. This cartography should be devoid of any attempt to deceive. Its only agenda should be to inform and enlighten.

That’s what made Trump’s marked-on map such a blasphemy: It attacked, on a fundamental level, truth, science and public trust. It wasn’t just a defacement of a public document, it was a defilement of a sacred trust.

Blow’s reaction is predicated in the notion that maps can’t lie, or at least don’t, or at least shouldn’t. Enter Mark Monmonier, the author of How to Lie with Maps (reviewed here), who was interviewed by CityLab about this kerfuffle. Even Monmonier, who has no illusions about maps’ claims to accuracy and objectivity, and who literally wrote the book on how hazard mapping can be misleading, seems to be sputtering:

Usually, attempts to falsify tend to happen before maps are published, and don’t try to contradict established scientific facts. You can put a spin on something by influencing the appearance of a map before it’s published. You can put a spin on things by determining what is and is not going to be mapped. Something that might put your administration in an unfavorable view, for example: Those maps won’t be part of the plan. […]

But the Trump map is unusual. I cannot find anything truly comparable. We had a map that was already out there that he actually mutilated, and in a very obvious way. This guy shows absolutely no subtlety at all. And then people try to make excuses for him. I have never seen anything like this.

Trump’s little stunt has revealed something very interesting about how we see maps.

The first edition of How to Lie with Maps came out in 1991, the second in 1996. (See my review of the second edition here.) Since then the cartographic landscape is much changed: the map a person may use most frequently may come via their phone rather than paper. But the advice found in this book is still valid. What goes for a paper map is still relevant to the map you call up on your iPhone. And so now, 22 years later, we have a third edition of How to Lie with Maps, which came out from the University of Chicago Press last April. For the most part it’s familiar territory. Other than a nip and tuck here and there and a few new chapters at the end, it’s largely the same book it was in 1996. How does it measure up in the present moment?

Mostly well, with some caveats. The core message of How to Lie with Maps will not become obsolete until maps do, which is to say never; but the examples and emphases are starting to become a bit dated. The reader might have to do a little more work in some cases to see the applicability of a chapter—to translate it into familiar terms—but that effort will be rewarded. For example, I think that everyone working with web-based maps should become quite familiar with chapter 3, “Map Generalization,” for its insights on what to include and exclude at different scales. The chapter on data maps, discussing the use of choropleths, cartograms and other data visualizations, is absolutely essential: so many of the maps being circulated as memes are data maps of some kind, and anything that improves the critical eye with regard to such maps is going to help.

But that chapter on data maps does get a bit lost in the weeds, especially for the general reader. And I’d have liked to have seen something on heat maps akin to this xkcd cartoon:

Bad internet maps have been described as a “social media plague”: they’re popular, they’re insidious, and they’re often not even wrong. But they’re not specifically dealt with in How to Lie with Maps, and that’s a blind spot: in the era of fake news, hoaxes and state-sponsored mendacity, maps that go viral are the ones most in need of a vaccination campaign.

Instead, the new chapters focus on image maps (satellite and aerial imagery), prohibitive cartography (which seems out of place here, and seems more a summary of Monmonier’s other work) and “fast maps,” which is more about web-based mapping than the stuff that gets shared on social media. The new chapters are noticeably more concise than the old. The net effect is a book that is still important, still relevant and still badly needed, but whose updates don’t quite bring it up to the present.

I received a review copy from the publisher.

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I was reminded of that day as I was reading Mark Monmonier’s memoir, Adventures in Academic Cartography, which does much the same thing as my prof did back then: pull back the veil to reveal an entire academic career that was hidden from our view. Monmonier is a familiar name to those of us interested in maps, having published a dozen books—scholarly, erudite but accessible to the lay reader—over the years. (I’ve reviewed three of them myself: How to Lie with Maps, his essential text on how maps persuade and deceive; Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, a look at the politicization of the Mercator projection; and From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, on the politics and controversies behind place names.) But, like my professor, we are largely aware of only one aspect of his career: in Monmonier’s case, the books. Adventures in Academic Cartography, which he self-published in the fall of 2014, fills in the blanks.

An academic career is not normally made of exciting stuff—as titles go, Adventures in Academic Cartography is surely ironic—and to be sure Monmonier’s memoir can be very dry and technical in places, particularly the chapters involving his academic research, which is much less accessible to a general reader than most of his books. In his preface, Monmonier readily admits that the book is unlikely to hold much interest for anyone not already interested in the history of academic cartography. “I’ve worked hard to make the narrative flow well, but Adventures is hardly a page-turner.”

A fair comment, but there is such a thing as false modesty, as well as protesting too much. Monmonier’s prose is as pellucid as ever; and if Adventures is unlikely to turn unsuspecting souls into academic cartographers (particularly given its often-expressed impatience with academic politics), it nevertheless contains much of interest to those with an interest in maps. With chapters organized by theme—which aids coherence, and allows readers to skip those of less interest—Monmonier builds a portrait of an academic career with many facets, from the core of teaching, research and committee work to the ways in which a professor can engage with the broader community, as consultant, editor and, of course, author.

The chapter on the books on which his reputation has been made is almost criminally slight, with only a few brief paragraphs per title; it’s as though the books ought to speak for themselves. (A chapter on writing does afford some insights into their creation.) But that’s amply compensated for by the detail provided by the chapter on his work on the History of Cartography project; the sixth volume, which he edited, covers the 20th century and was released last year. His account of its creation makes me want to buy a copy of the damn thing for myself, and hang the $500 cost. Also fascinating is his chapter on map collecting—his own modest collection, and his encounters with the world of map collectors.

As should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read his book on the Mercator controversy (or his essay on critical cartography), Monmonier has always been sharply critical of the use of critical theory in cartography, and its use of abstruse language and theoretical call-backs when plainer speech and original thought will suffice. He’s got a chapter explaining his position here—he’s been called a historical materialist, if that helps—as well. (Though as another materialist who’s gotten a face-full of critical theory in my own academic career, I might quibble on a point or two, such as his complaint about “a map historian who once referred to the mapping of Eastern Europe as ‘the cartographicization’ (italics mine) of eastern Europe” [p. 197]—I can see how cartographicization and mapping can mean subtly different things.)

Like another academic memoir I’ve read recently (Tracks and Shadows by the herpetologist Harry W. Greene), the personal and private does not much intrude on the professional, at least once Monmonier’s career gets under way. It’s an academic memoir in every sense, an account of a long and distinguished career that offers insights into the profession and the subject matter being studied. As such it’s not for everyone, but I think a few of you would find it a fascinating read.

Adventures in Academic Cartography: A Memoir by Mark Monmonier
Bar Scale Press, November 2014
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