For example, the importance of wind. The opening chapter on physical geography includes a map of the average annual wind speed, maps showing the growth in wind turbine installations, and maps of tornado tracks and derecho intensities. It’s one thing to know, vaguely, that Iowa is in the Great Plains tornado belt, something else to see the implications of wind of all kinds in map form. The second chapter looks at Iowa’s history, and from a cartographic perspective is the most interesting, including several historical maps and maps showing the shifting territorial and state boundaries.

If Iowa is associated with anything, it’s agriculture, especially corn; and yes, agriculture gets its chapter, showing the rise and fall of various products—the rise in corn, soybean and hogs, the decline in horses, sheep, oats and wheat. But the following chapter looks at the urban and industrial side of Iowa, and the shift away from agriculture to other sectors. Between the chapters on demographics and political, religious and social patterns, a portrait emerges of a state whose population is aging, urbanizing, less and less foreign-born (once the first wave of settlement passed)—at least insofar as a series of county-level graduated symbol maps can depict it.

In the end, the Atlas of Iowa is a case study in how an interesting story can emerge from fairly ordinary maps. That said, it does seem like this atlas relies a bit too much on symbol and choropleth maps to tell that story, especially past the first couple of chapters, when we get into the demographic and economic nitty-gritty. The quintiles used in the ancestry maps, which are census-district-level choropleths, vary so much from map to map (the top quintile for French ancestry tops out at 8.32 percent and for German at 62.9 percent) that comparison is impossible—could other thematic methods have done the trick? Could the cultural maps have benefited from a more pictorial approach? And the political section is surprisingly limited to voting patterns for presidential elections and the change in congressional district boundaries: no state-level politics or congressional voting patterns.

To be fair, I’m not the target audience for this book. Its choices need to make sense to Iowans, not necessarily me. And no doubt there were space and time constraints on this project: at roughly 200 pages this is not a big book. Wishing it had been even larger or more ambitious—taking up even more time and resources to produce—is not normally the most useful feedback. Being left wanting more is not always a bad thing.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

Atlas of Iowa
by Robert C. Shepard, Patrick Bitterman, J. Clark Archer and Fred M. Shelley. University of Iowa Press, 30 Aug 2024. $40.
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I’ve mentioned the Atlas of Design series before, but it’s worth introducing it properly. Published every two years since 2012 by the North American Cartographic Information Society, the Atlas of Design is powered by volunteer editors and contributor submissions. Nobody’s getting paid for working on or appearing in these volumes—though it must be said that many of these maps are commercial ventures (posters available for sale at the mapper’s website) or works for hire (National Geographic and the Washington Post are represented in volume six), so the mapmakers aren’t doing this just for the exposure.

All the same, the production values are, if volume six is any indication, pretty close to first-rate.¹ Which is to be expected when this much graphic design firepower is brought together in one place. The maps—32² of them in volume six—are reproduced marvellously. Many of the maps are large and detailed, so closeups showing that detail often accompany a reduced-size full look at the map; this is absolutely necessary in some cases, such as Jug Cerovic’s transport map of Takamatsu, Eric Knight’s panoramic map of the Alps, or Alex McPhee’s map of Alberta.

More than a few of these maps are familiar, having been shared widely online, and some of them have even been featured on this website. Not for the first time have I found in print form something that I see as a kindred spirit to what I’m trying to do here on The Map Room. Indeed, what I appreciate most about the Atlas of Design is its commitment—one that I share—to covering the full diversity of what constitutes maps and mapmaking.

What I mean about that is this. I’ve often noticed that when people are passionate about a thing, what they really are is passionate about a subset of that thing—without really being aware of it. Ask someone if they’re into music, generally, and they’ll say yes, generally, even if there are entire genres they have no interest in: for example, most of the guys who are really into vinyl records (and yes they’re generally guys) seem to be mainly into classic rock or electronica. The same is true of other cultural fields: avid readers rarely read every genre avidly. The rest of the field is kind of a blind spot.

Is this also true of maps? You’d expect some siloing of interests to occur: people who collect 16th-century maps aren’t necessarily interested in the latest turns of the geospatial industry. And yet I’ve found that people who are interested in maps are interested in all kinds of maps, at least to some extent. (The Map Room wouldn’t still be a going concern after 20 years if they weren’t.)

And the Atlas of Design provides some evidence in support of that point, because if there’s one thing you can’t say about the maps contained therein, it’s that they’re all the same. This is by design; as the editors wrote last year during the submission period, “There are no restrictions on subject matter, geography, or language. And if you want to send us a map of planet Qo’noS written entirely in Klingon, we’d love to see that, too.”³ There are maps that are hand-drawn and maps that are data-driven, maps that are deeply personal (including a couple of lockdown maps and a map of a canoe trip) and maps that show a single data layer. There are transit maps and panoramic pictorials and fantasy maps, population maps, and there’s Kenneth Field’s iconic map of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, done in screws and butcher block.

But there are some caveats to this diversity and (in the secular sense) catholicity. One, obviously, is that these are recent maps made by working (or at least living) cartographers and artists who took the time to submit them for consideration. Another is that regardless of whether they were produced digitally or with pen and ink (or butcher block and screws), these are static maps. They’re being reproduced in the pages of a book. So you’re not going to get screencaps of an ArcGIS story map or dashboard, or any other sort of interactive map. But honestly, the point of most interactive maps is the data rather than the presentation; the point of these maps is very much their presentation. This is, after all, a showcase of map design: look, it’s right there in the title! And it’s fascinating to see just how much range there is out there in mapmaking land.

It’s just as true if you look back at the sample maps from previous issues: see volumes one, two, three, four and five. And it’s just gotten a lot easier to own the complete set. It was announced last week that the first four volumes of the Atlas of Design are being reprinted; there’s a discount for a couple of the volumes if you pre-order before May 15 (that’s Monday!), as well as if you’re a NACIS member. Which is to say that all six volumes are (back) in print and available for order. That might be something to consider.

From last November: MapLab on volume six of the Atlas of Design.

Previously: David Nuttall’s Maps of Fictional Places; Atlas of Design, Volume 3.

This piece is a little bit different from the usual review, in that it examines The Cartographers in the context of mysteries and fantasy that deploy similar map tropes, as well as the idées fixes our culture has about maps. As I write in the review, there’s an awful lot for me to unpack:

I have been writing about maps for nearly two decades, and in that time I have encountered many works of fiction that incorporate maps and map tropes into their storytelling, whether as paratexts or as plot elements, and I have never encountered a story, at any length, as thoroughly encompassed by maps as The Cartographers. It’s not just that almost every character in the book works with maps in some fashion, whether as a cartographer, artist, librarian, map dealer, or technician. Nor are maps just a plot point—they are the point. The Cartographers is a Stations of the Map: its pilgrimage follows a path that touches on so many aspects of maps and mapmaking, from academic cartography to fire insurance maps. It spends time on the purpose and meaning of maps: it aspires to an almost Socratic dialogue. It deploys familiar fantasy genre tropes about maps. But it’s structured as a mystery novel, and opens with a murder.

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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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North American Maps for Curious Minds

The series is a spinoff of the Brilliant Maps website, and can be seen as an attempt to render viral map memes in book form: if this book is any indication, the maps themselves are the sort that tend to get shared across social media platforms. One I recognized right away was no. 8: the first country you’ll reach going east or west from every point on the coast. Their appearance between hard covers is to be honest a bit unexpected, and to be honest, the translation from screen to page doesn’t always work.

Partly that’s because of the limitations of the media: a book’s page is a fixed size. Maps on paper can’t be interactive, but they also can’t be too crowded or too empty, and to be honest the latter problem is more at play here, with choropleth and pictorial maps that are, to be blunt, too simple, particularly the country-level choropleth maps: when such a map has Canada and the U.S. on it, there’s a lot of undifferentiated colour (for example, no. 23 on head of state salaries, no. 27 on military expenditure per capita, nos. 80 and 81 on average height, no. 96 on the unbanked). Such maps would be fine in Instagram-sized proportions, but they don’t scale up. In fact, these country-level choropleths are fine examples of maps that don’t need to be maps: they’d be easier to understand, and take up less space, as graphs or tables.

Which is not to say that they’re all like that. The best of them go deeper than country or state/province and offer some real detail. These include the climate maps (nos. 31 and 32) and the supervolcano (no. 38), glacial maximum (no. 39), dark sky (no. 40) and solstice (nos. 43-46) maps—basically, most of the nature chapter. Add to that the county-level maps: second homes (no. 70), language (no. 73), commuting (nos. 94 and 95) and internet access (no. 100).

The county-level maps, like slightly more than half of the total maps—53 out of 100—focus solely on the United States (another two look specifically at Alaska or Hawaii); more than a few of the others include Canada and Mexico but are very much centred on the continental U.S. via the usual Albers projection. Basically, the U.S. is in every map, the rest of North America in some of them. To be sure, some of the subjects being mapped are quintessentially American, like the number of Waffle Houses by latitude (no. 76). In other cases the limitation no doubt stems from where the data being mapped comes from, though a more continental focus would be possible in a few cases: I can see no reason to exclude Canada, for example, from the maps of indigenous homelands (nos. 74 and 75). It’s possible to use more than one dataset in a map.

In the end, these are basically low- to medium-effort maps that present reasonably interesting, but unchallenging, factoids in a pleasant enough format at the intersection of choropleth and pictorial maps. In that, plus its lack of an overarching point other than “isn’t this interesting,” North American Maps for Curious Minds is a bit insubstantial. Like a map meme that goes viral, a quick sugar hit of popular cartography, but not much more than that.

I received a review copy of this book from one of the authors.

North American Maps for Curious Minds
by Matthew Bucklan and Victor Cizek
The Experiment, 30 Nov 2021
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Though when it comes to building islands, the artificial gets the bulk of Bonnett’s attention—but then people have been building islands at a rather brisk clip lately; volcanoes can’t keep up. Bonnett visits the various kinds, from the Netherlands’ polders to Dubai’s crass luxury archipelagos—and its imitators in Panama and Hainan—to China’s various military islands built up to buttress its claims to the South China Sea, to the expansion of Hong Kong’s airport. There’s a lot of money involved in these projects, not least because people pay a premium for proximity to the sea, but Bonnett repeatedly makes the point that climate change means these islands will be short-lived. “It’s odd, then, that building small flat islands in warmer latitudes is such big business. One day the dots will join.”¹

In the book’s smaller second part, Bonnett turns to a consideration of islands that are disappearing. And while volcanoes, earthquakes and even nuclear tests can be the cause of islands being removed from the map, the main point here is anthropogenetic climate change. Bonnett travels from Panama’s San Blas Islands to Tonga to the Scilly Isles southwest of England to survey the imminent and the inevitable. The contrast is stark and deliberate. The map is being remade in both ways: islands are being built while others are on the brink of disappearing, but the benefits and damages are not evenly distributed. Bonnett does not pull his punches, but he is less angry than he ought to be. “We keep building islands even as natural islands are disappearing. The new ones are not very high and they are vulnerable to storms and sea-surges. Are we crazy?”² The question more or less answers itself.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the University of Chicago Press.

Elsewhere: A Journey into Our Age of Islands
by Alastair Bonnett
University of Chicago Press, 17 Nov 2020
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The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands
by Alastair Bonnett
Atlantic Books, 7 May 2020 (U.K. edition)
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But counting maps would miss the difference in Maier’s approach. To invoke xkcd, this is depth-first rather than breadth-first: there are fewer maps here, but they’re discussed in much more depth than the two-page spreads of the hundred-map books, and provided with much more context. This is a history of Rome in maps in which history, Rome and maps all get their proper share of attention.

The Eternal City is divided into ten chapters, covering Rome from antiquity to the present. Each of those chapters explores not just an era but a theme via close study of three or four maps. The chapter themes can sometimes transcend the chapter periods: the first chapter, for example, talks about how Rome has been delineated by its walls, and discusses how walls have defined what is and isn’t Rome; Chapter Two’s discussion of Roman travel networks invokes not only the Tabula Peutingeriana, but also Sasha Trubetskoy’s Tube map of the Roman road network.

Maier also asks deeply historical questions: in Chapter Seven and Eight, which discuss tourism by the leisure class (i.e., Grand Tours) and mass tourism (exemplified by package tours and Baedeker guides), respectively, the question of these maps’ audience—where do these maps come from, and who were they produced for—gets considered, which is something I’d like to see more of. And in her close study of Antonio Tempesta’s 1593 bird’s-eye view of Rome, she notes what is omitted (the sex workers’ quarter) and what is deemphasized (the Jewish ghetto).

Maier’s art-historian approach manages to extract the big picture from a close study of historical images. We are always reminded that maps are a means to understanding their object: in these maps that object is the city of Rome, but the Rome being perceived by one map is not necessarily the Rome seen by another. Rome as historical site, as cultural capital, as tourism destination—and yes, as a place real people actually live—exist at once. For Maier, Rome is a cartographic palimpsest.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Featured image: Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarium (1493), from The Eternal City, pp. 68-69. Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
by Jessica Maier
University of Chicago Press, 24 Nov 2020 (U.S.), 7 Dec 2020 (U.K.)
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Mark Ovenden has made a career of publishing books about transportation systems and their maps that are both comprehensive and copiously illustrated. These include books about transit maps, railway maps and airline maps, as well as books about specific transit systems like the London Underground and the Paris Metro.

His latest, Underground Cities (Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep), is in some ways a natural progression from his past work: in the introduction he muses on the link between transit geekery and wondering about “what else lies down there beyond the walls” (p. 6). But in other ways this is quite a different book.

For one thing, Underground Cities is a book about cities’ underground infrastructure in general: not just subway lines and stations, but pedways, sewers, pneumatic mail systems and other utilities. For another, though maps, diagrams and other illustrations are found throughout this book, it’s about the infrastructure, not the maps.

The book is organized by city: 32 in all, 19 of which are in Europe, starting on the west coast of North America and moving eastward across Europe and Asia. Each chapter has a short essay on the underground infrastructure of the city, and is illustrated by photos (mostly of subway stations) and diagrams. Twenty of the chapters come with more detailed diagrams and maps. There are three types. First, each has a vertical scale showing just how deep the sewers, pipes caverns and subway stations go. Second, there’s a featured three-dimensional cutaway diagram showing the layout of some key facility, like a subway station or shopping mall. (London’s Picadilly station and Paris’s Forum des Halles are absolute standouts here, as are the facilities you wouldn’t expect, like Tokyo’s bike vaults, Helsinki’s swimming hall, or the Boring Company test tunnel in Los Angeles.)

Finally, there’s a two-page map spread of the underground city, which includes subways (and some surface rail lines), sewer lines and pedestrian passages. Each map spread uses a single colour scheme; all subway lines are orange regardless of the colour assigned to them by the official subway maps, which means that the Red Line and the Blue Line are all depicted with orange lines. A dense subway network like Paris’s becomes cluttered and indistinguishable. The map shows that there’s a subway line there, but it’s decidedly not for navigation. It’s an overview. So too is the text an overview, though there are some interesting gems there, like the cheese storage in New York City, and the tunnels carved into the Rock of Gibraltar.

Even with the included photographs, maps and diagrams, compared to some of Mark’s earlier books Underground Cities seems a bit sparse, if only because Transit Maps of the World and Paris Underground (the two books I’ve seen and reviewed) were so lavish and colourful. (Also, 12 out of the 32 cities have no maps or diagrams.) It occurs to me that this is probably a function of its subject matter. Transit systems have maps, posters and other ephemera that can be reprinted; sewer systems, pneumatic tube lines and bomb shelters, not so much. Those systems may (like Moscow’s secret Metro-2, or Tokyo’s mystery tunnels, both of which are tantalizingly and all too briefly mentioned here) be unmappable, though it may simply be that the systems are just unmapped, at least not in an accessible fashion. Rather than reprinting, Mark must have maps (by Lovell Johns) and cutaway diagrams (by Robert Brandt) made for purpose, which is (I’m guessing here) an impediment to going all-out.

For the purposes of The Map Room’s audience, this is not a book where the maps are front and centre; it’s an interesting introduction to a map-adjacent subject, and it’s got interesting maps and diagrams, though not nearly enough of them. This was a pregnant book that left me wanting more: more cities, more maps, more detail in the text and illustrations, as though every chapter ought to have been a book in its own right.

Disclosures: I received an electronic review copy of this book from NetGalley. Mark and I are acquainted in an online sense, and I’ve published an essay of his on The Map Room.

Underground Cities
by Mark Ovenden
Frances Lincoln, 22 Sep 2020
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It’s important to remember a book’s target audience—its imagined ideal reader. In the case of Star Maps this is Kanas’s younger self, who came to map collecting via his lifelong interest in amateur astronomy. “I was frustrated that there was not a single book on celestial cartography that could inform me about the various aspects of my collecting,” he writes in the preface to the first edition. “What I needed was a book that not only was a primer for the collector but also had sufficient reference detail to allow me to identify and understand my maps. Nothing like this appeared, so I decided to write such a book some day” (p. xxi). In other words, for a compendium this is a surprisingly personal book, one that reflects his own journey into the subject and, presumably, his interests as a collector.

I’ll post the full review on The Map Room once I’ve checked my draft against the published copy. In the meantime, check out the issue of Calafia (PDF) in which it appears. (Update, 24 Jun 2020: Here it is.)

Star Maps: History, Artistry, and Cartography
3rd edition
by Nick Kanas
Springer Praxis, Sept 2019
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When a map has a mistake on it, when it’s wrong, it does something funny to our heads. We obey our phones and dashboard GPS navigators even when they send us off a cliff. We concoct nutty theories about ancient civilizations because a 16th-century portolan chart had a funny bend on a coastline. We wonder, because someone wrote “here be dragons” on a map, whether dragons were actually real. We make brain pretzels trying to force maps to be truthful even when they are manifestly wrong.¹

Maps have to tell the truth. They simply have to. Maybe that’s why stories about mistakes on the map, and the havoc those mistakes cause, fascinate us so much. Which brings me to three books, all published for the first time in 2016, that talk about map errors of an older kind: islands and other features that appeared on maps, sometimes for centuries, that in the end turned out not to exist.

Long before we got this funny idea that maps had to be truthful, before Edney’s ideal of cartography took hold, maps were full of conjectures, rumours, mistakes in surveying and even some outright frauds.

Take, for example, Frisland. A hoax perpetuated by the 14th-century Zeno brothers of Venice, or possibly their 16th century descendent: the latter published a book of the Zeno brothers’ correspondence in which they described their travels to Frisland, a large island south of Iceland in the North Atlantic with a Latin-speaking ruler. (Many phantom islands of the era seem to be full of previously undiscovered Christian realms where Latin is spoken: they’re a westerly variant of the Prester John legend.) The story was swallowed whole, and Frisland appeared on many maps; England claimed it. It took centuries for the Frisland myth to disappear completely. (Previously: The Invention of Frisland.)

Or for a more recent example, the island of Bermeja in the Gulf of Mexico. First sighted in the 16th century (but not since), it remained on maps of the region into the 20th century. In 2009 a Mexican aerial survey determined the non-existence of the island, which led to some conspiracy theories that it had been destroyed by the Americans: its position might have been important in determining who owned the subsurface oil exploitation rights in the Gulf of Mexico, and an agreement with the U.S. had just been completed on that very issue.

“[A]s the story of Bermeja demonstrates, a fascinating characteristic of many of these misbeliefs is their remarkable durability,” writes Edward Brooke-Hitching in The Phantom Atlas (Simon & Schuster UK, Nov 2016; Chronicle, Apr 2018). Indeed, as all three of the books under review today demonstrate, phantom islands continue to be “un-discovered” into the present day.

But where do phantom islands come from? “Among the multitude of non-existent islands that have appeared on maps over the past few centuries,” writes Malachy Tallack in The Un-Discovered Islands (Birlinn, Oct 2016; Picador, Nov 2017), “the vast majority are the result of mistakes. They are accidental phantoms, caused by imperfect navigation, optical illusions or poor recording by mariners and cartographers. Sometimes, though, there is no accident at all. Islands are invented deliberately, often creating inordinate confusion as a result.” To that list Brooke-Hitching adds mythology and religious dogma, which surely must have been at play with not just Frisland, but Hy-Brasil and Saint Brendan’s Island too; as well as volcanic destruction, because that can be a thing; and, because The Phantom Atlas isn’t just talking about islands, copyright traps.

In the end, the solution to a phantom island is more exploration: repeated voyages and surveys. Of course, establishing that something doesn’t exist—proving a negative, in other words—is much more difficult than suggesting that it existed in the first place. “Often, the process of refuting the existence of an island is more exciting, but also more complicated and dangerous, than its discovery,”² writes Dirk Liesemer in Phantom Islands, first published in Germany in 2016 as Lexikon der Phantominseln (Mare), now translated into English by Peter Lewis and published, last October, by Haus.

So, three books, with the same premise, covering the same territory, often using the same examples, and in much the same way, published at more or less the same time. Must have been something in the water.³ These books are more similar than not. It’s tempting to treat them as a whole. So I will.

Each is a collection of short chapters explaining how an island was added to the map, and how it was found out not to exist. I’m glossing over a lot in that sentence: there are some truly fascinating stories in these books. The Un-Discovered Islands covers twenty-four of them (with another ten briefly mentioned), arranged by theme; Phantom Islands covers thirty, in alphabetical order. The Phantom Atlas has sixty chapters, also arranged alphabetically, and goes beyond islands to other geographical features, and indeed to more intangible subjects, with chapters on the various monsters found on maps, and the ideas of a flat earth and an earthly paradise.

Naturally there is some overlap: a total of 11 mythical islands are covered by all three books, for example. (These are, for the record, Antilla, Atlantis, the Aurora Islands, Bermeja, Buss Island, Crocker Land, Frisland, Hy-Brasil, Saint Brendan’s Island, Sandy Island and Thule.)

Both Phantom Islands and The Un-Discovered Islands are relatively short, at 160 and 144 pages respectively. They’re elegantly designed but more illustrated than mapped, if you follow me. The Phantom Atlas is nearly twice as long and has two to three times the chapters (it also costs twice as much); it fills that space with reproductions of maps and art and other illustrations. (I read the ebook version, which in hindsight was a mistake: you get the images, but not the page layout.) The Phantom Atlas has its eye set on the coffee table: it’s the kind of map book you look at as much as you read it. The other two not so much, but they make up for it with stronger prose: each of these little books make for an afternoon’s pleasant reading, with The Un-Discovered Islands being a little more slight, and Phantom Islands having a somewhat different focus owing to its originally being written for a German audience.

In the end it depends on what you’re looking for. Information on phantom islands is readily available online, but these books spin their tales better, and The Phantom Atlas has better pictures. And these books’ overlap (see above) is not so much that you’d be wasting your time or money by reading all three. Particularly if you find this subject fascinating.

I received a review copy of Phantom Islands from the publisher. I bought the other two as ebooks.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
by Edward Brooke-Hitching
Simon & Schuster UK, Nov 2016 (U.K. edition)
Chronicle, April 2018 (U.S. edition)
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Phantom Islands
by Dirk Liesemer
translated by Peter Lewis
Haus, Oct 2019
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The Un-Discovered Islands
by Malachy Tallack
Birlinn, Oct 2016 (U.K. edition)
Picador, Nov 2017 (U.S. edition)
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Matthew H. Edney’s Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press, April) is a full-throated jeremiad against the concept of cartography itself—the ideal of cartography, which after 237 densely argued pages Edney says “is quite simply indefensible.” Or as the subtitle to the first chapter states: “There is no such thing as cartography, and this is a book about it.”

On the surface this is a startling argument to make, particularly for Edney, who holds two roles that are very much about cartography and its history: he’s the Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine (where, among other things, he’s affiliated with the Osher Map Library) and the current director of the History of Cartography Project. With this book, Edney is essentially undermining the foundations of his own profession.

He does so systematically. Cartography, he argues, isn’t a discrete process: there are many different mapping traditions that don’t necessarily have very much to do with one another (a fantasy mapmaker doesn’t have much in common with someone working on the Google Maps database, for example); “cartography” forcibly gathers these dissimilar maps together under a normative ideal.

That ideal, Edney says, has a history: it developed after about 1800, and as such is a relatively recent invention; but it’s been applied retroactively to all the mapmaking that went on before that date. That ideal was in the service of a certain kind of mapmaking product born out of the systemic mapmaking surveys of the 18th and 19th centuries. Cartography-the-ideal is public, altruistic, unbiased and empiricist: Cartography’s end product is The Map, a Platonic ideal of universality and accuracy.

It’s teleological, full of assumptions about progress and expertise—and in Edney’s view, completely wrong. It diminishes what we can say about maps except in terms of how accurate they are; and by prioritizing scale as a universal component of all maps (for example) it eliminates maps that don’t conform to the cartographic ideal (such as the Beck diagram) and runs into problems with map projections.

Most problematically, I think, it perpetrates the notion that maps tell the unmediated truth—a notion that has become deeply embedded in popular culture. Why else would the Piri Reis map’s bend in the coast of South America be taken as evidence of an ice-free Antarctica instead of what it almost certainly was: a hack done because the chartmaker was running out of parchment. (See previous entry: The Piri Reis Map of 1513.) Or even that the presence of “Here Be Dragons” on a map could be proof of the historical existence of dragons. The idea that maps cannot be wrong is a product of Cartography-as-ideal.

Cartography is a thought-provoking book, but it’s not for the casual reader. It’s not remotely an introductory text. Understanding its arguments requires prior knowledge. This is a text for college students, for academics, for anyone who has been thinking about cartography in an academic or theoretical sense. But for that audience, Cartography may well be an essential, even formative text. It’s an important book—but it’s not for everyone.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Previously: Reviews of Edney’s Cartography.

Cartography: The Ideal and Its History
by Matthew H. Edney
University of Chicago Press, April 2019
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I’ve reviewed books about maps in this general field before. Stephen J. Hornsby’s Picturing America (reviewed here) explores the rich pictorial map tradition in the United States during the early and mid-20th century. The Art of Map Illustration (reviewed here), on the other hand, is a focused, step-by-step guide to the how of modern-day map illustration.

The Art of Illustrated Maps: A Complete Guide to Creative Mapmaking’s History, Process and Inspiration (HOW Books, October 2015) falls somewhere in between. Written by John Roman, it’s a book that talks about the creative process in considerable detail, and gives many contemporary examples of map illustrations, but tries to place that process in the context of the history of map illustrations.

Roman isn’t just a working illustrator with an extensive portfolio of map illustrations, but also a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. That’s reflected in the first part of The Art of Illustrated Maps, which is a history of illustrated maps that traces their origins to Claudius Ptolemy, notes their divergence from more scientific cartography (he distinguishes between illustrated maps and cartographic or technical maps) and highlights the discovery of linear perspective as “the most significant advance in the airts to aid the map illustrator. Without it, art would have remained abstract and objective, and illlustrated maps would lack the three-dimensional effect that makes such imagery so visually captivating” (p. 38).

It’s a bit under-researched, and there’s a fair bit of historical hand-waving: it doesn’t stand up against scholarly histories of cartography, but as a brief survey whose intended audience is students of map illustration—I strongly suspect this is derived from his college lectures—it serves its purpose. It establishes, like Hornsby’s Picturing America, that map illustration has a tradition.

From there we move on to the present day and the practical concerns of making illustrated maps. Part II talks about the creative process, inspiration, and communicating with the viewer, using some basic art principles. It seems a bit thin for a book, and not quite on topic, until you realize that this is exactly the sort of thing you’d find in a college instructor’s lectures, so, again, I assume that’s where this material comes from.

In Part III Roman takes us through the process of creating two of his map illustrations—one for a magazine, the other a campus map (campus maps make up a large part of his portfolio); Part IV collects examples of work by other map illustrators, giving us a greater sense of the diversity of work in this field, as well as what’s possible, more so than we would have gotten from examining Roman’s own oeuvre.

The end result is a book that does not break any new ground from a research perspective and is of limited use as a reference, but makes a perfectly fine textbook for students of map illustration who are new to the form. Understand it as such.

Previously: The Art of Illustrated Maps.

The Art of Illustrated Maps: A Complete Guide to Creative Mapmaking’s History, Process and Inspiration
by John Roman
HOW Books, October 2015
Amazon

For the last two and a half years, Betsy and Greg have written a blog of the same name for National Geographic; from 2013 to 2015 they did the same thing with Map Lab, a map blog for Wired. Their background with regard to maps is similar to mine: “We are not experts in cartography or its history; we’re journalists with a lifelong love of maps who were eager to learn more,” they write in the book’s introduction.

It’s an approach that’s worked well enough for me as well: there’s something to be said for beginner’s mind, and for approaching your subject unconstrained by what you already know. One thing I’ve noticed in more than 15 years of map blogging is how siloed mappers are: antique map collectors, GIS pros, academic cartographers, web mappers, map illustrators—they all work in their own corners, and there isn’t as much cross-fertilization between them as you might think. It may take non-specialists like us to see the big picture, because we don’t know enough about any one corner. “Maps” is too big a subject to master.

In that vein, “eager to learn more” can yield real results. Those results can be awfully eclectic, and All Over the Map is proof of that. There’s no real attempt to limit the scope of their subject: the book’s title, though borrowed from the blog, is not out of place. The book is loosely organized by theme, and those themes are themselves fairly broadly defined: “Waterways,” “Cities,” “Conflicts and Crisis,” among others; within that thin structure, we are introduced to maps of every time, place and subject: maps from early modern Europe and pre-colonial Mexico, maps of the Moon and the ocean floor, of ski hills, of rugged terrain, of enemy territory, of the flows of water and people. Online maps are reproduced with just as much care as an ancient manuscript.

Turning a blog into a book works better than you might think. The essays in All Over the Map (the book) have been substantially reworked and rewritten from their first appearance in All Over the Map (the blog). They work well in book form, for a couple of reasons. One, Betsy and Greg are more thorough than I am: whereas my old-school type of blogging emphasizes quick links with minimal explanation, they dig further into the subject, interviewing experts and even the subject (if still living).¹ In other words, they’re journalists practicing journalism. And two, the form of the book—this largeish (30 × 25 cm), full-colour book—allows for the maps to take proper centre stage. It flips the relationship of the web page: the text is tiny, the images large. The maps can be appreciated better this way. Astonishingly, the blog is better as a book.

The maps they include are familiar, at least to me: they and I were working the same source material at the same time, and I don’t disagree with any of their choices. Not having a theme means that there is no reason not to include an interesting map, or to include an uninteresting map because it’s somehow important.

This is as catholic, as inclusive, a collection as I have ever encountered. As an introduction to where things stand in the mapping world, to the best of what I’ve seen lately, I’d have a hard time coming up with something better.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey
by Betsy Mason and Greg Miller
National Geographic, October 2018
Amazon | Bookshop

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

Edited by the historian of exploration Huw Lewis-Jones, The Writer’s Map is a collection of essays and maps that explore the relationship between maps and stories; the essays are written both by the creators of those stories—Cressida Cowell, Lev Grossman, Frances Hardinge, David Mitchell and Philip Pullman make appearances—and by the mapmakers who were inspired by those stories, such as Roland Chambers, Daniel Reeve and others. It also draws an important connection between travel and adventure stories of the past and modern fantasy, and explains why “here be dragons” is as much an attractant as it is a warning. Read my review.

The Writer’s Map is published by Thames and Hudson in the U.K. and by the University of Chicago Press in North America, from which I received a review copy.

Previously: More from (and on) The Writer’s Map; David Mitchell on Starting with a Map; Essays on Literary Maps: Treasure Island, Moominland and the Marauder’s Map.

Schulten, a history professor at the University of Denver, is the author of The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). These are social histories of maps and mapmaking, which is very much my kind of thing, and I’ve been meaning to check out Schulten’s (and Martin Brückner’s) work for some time. From what I gather, Schulten’s work focuses on how maps were made and used—the function of maps.

That focus shows up in this book: the maps are explored in terms of how they were used in the past by the people who made them, bought them and read them: “to master and claim territory, defeat an enemy, advance a cause, investigate a problem, learn geography, advertise a destination, entertain an audience, or navigate terrain” (p. 8). But for the reader, the maps hold another purpose: to tell a story.

Because this book’s title is not a mistake: it’s a history of America—of the region that eventually became the United States—told through maps. It’s as if we’re watching a slideshow presentation of the history of the U.S., only every slide illustrating the talk is of a map. The maps, in other words, are as much a means to an end as they are objects that command our interest in and of themselves. As a result, the maps chosen for this book are maps with stories to tell. The text that accompanies each map is longer than you usually get in map collections: whereas in Atlas Harper may talk about provenance, the sources of the knowledge embedded in the map, and the map as an object, Schulten will go on to talk about the historical context of the map (which, to be fair, is something far easier to do when dealing with maps from the eighteenth century onward). It’s the difference between a curatorial approach and an historical approach.

That historical approach means that Schulten does not shy away from maps that cover darker periods in America’s history: in the second chapter, a ca. 1650 map of west Africa turns up, seemingly out of place, to remind us of the Atlantic slave trade. It also means, particularly in the later chapters, where Schulten relies less and less on the British Library’s holdings, that the maps are not necessarily rare or valuable, but highlight some aspect of American history or American mapmaking: illustrated maps, propaganda maps, maps for the blind.

It is, in Schulten’s words, “an eclectic and selective discussion” of “the iconic as well as the unfamiliar”: we see many of the maps we would have expected to see: Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world, John Smith’s maps, the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, the Lewis and Clark map, the 1861 choropleth map showing the distribution of the slave population, an early electoral map. But because this is not simply a political history, we are treated to other maps, of sciences, culture and the arts: everything from bison populations to the mid-Atlantic ridge to Disneyland. All excellently reproduced, some with closeup details as well as the entire map.

It’s no small feat to produce a collection of maps that covers so many bases: narrative line, quality of maps, diverse and thorough coverage.

A History of America in 100 Maps is published by the University of Chicago Press in the Americas and by the British Library in the U.K. Both editions are available now.

There’s also an accompanying website that includes 15 of the book’s 100 maps.

I received a review copy of this book from the University of Chicago Press.

A History of America in 100 Maps
by Susan Schulten
University of Chicago Press, September 2018
The British Library, November 2018
Amazon | Bookshop

There are several ways to do it: Treasures from the Map Room, Debbie Hall’s 2016 collection of maps from the Bodleian Library (reviewed here), organizes itself by subject, for example. Whereas the book under consideration here, Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library (The British Library, 11 October), curated by the Library’s Tom Harper, organizes its many interesting and beautiful maps by continent. This is exactly the structure of a world atlas, and explains Harper’s choice of title. The chapters on each continent are bookended by chapters on the universe, world maps, seas and oceans, and fantasy worlds; and the continents are deliberately and pointedly arranged in alphabetical order, with Africa leading and Europe last.¹

Not giving Europe primacy of place is a deliberate and laudatory gesture, but it’s ultimately futile. Europe may be the last of the continental chapters, but it’s still the largest, making up a third of the book’s pages. (Atlas unexpectedly opens with one of Benjamin Hennig’s cartograms, showing which areas of the world are covered most often in the book. Europe and, strangely, the Caribbean are larger than usual.) And European cartography suffuses the other chapters as well: many of the maps of the Americas, Africa and Asia, for example, were done in a colonial or imperial context. (Which explains all the Caribbean maps.) In other words, many of these maps are artifacts of the British Empire; the fact that these are maps from the British Library is inescapable. (England is, as you might expect, particularly well covered.)

While the early modern period is represented best, as you might expect, Atlas has a reasonably good diversity of maps from the medieval to the modern, from mappae mundi to fire insurance maps and escape maps. But its decision to group maps by location rather by time period is jarring: maps from the World Wars are interspersed with medieval treasures and renaissance classics like Blaeu, Ortelius and Pitt. We’re taken from Bellotto’s 1740s-era drawings of Lucca, Italy to a 1990s topo map of Zermatt, Switzerland, then to a 1500 map of Germany by Etzlaub, and then to a World War II USAAF map of Bremerhaven to be used by bombing crews. Reading Atlas from front to back can be an exercise in disorientation.

None of which should be taken to mean that there’s a map out of place in this book, or not of interest. As a collection of disparate cartographic gems from the British Library, Atlas delivers. For me, the highlights are those maps that did not come from formal European mapmaking enterprises: the 1682 Guatemalan pirate map, the Indian Office map of Delhi in the 1850s produced by a local draughtsman—the Asian chapter is easily the most interesting and diverse of the lot. But in the end, Atlas’s organizing conceit does more to hinder than help: the whole ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Atlas is out now in the U.K. and will be available in North America on 1 January 2019.

Amazon | Amazon UK

The bare bones of Tharp’s story are therefore fairly well known: while mapping the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, she discovered the presence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—and, more specifically, its rift valley, providing tangible evidence of continental drift. Because continental drift was at that point considered to be a crackpot theory, it took some doing for Tharp’s discovery to be accepted; and when it was her contributions were to some extent minimized.

While Felt’s book is positioned as a biography, its strength is in the details of that pivotal discovery: how and where it was made, and by whom, and in what context. Tharp’s work was not done in a vacuum, and how and why she was where she was is important. Felt sets the stage for us: not only does she take us through Tharp’s early childhood and rather variegated education and her arrival in 1948 at the Lamont Observatory, she gives us a short history of that Observatory, of the theory of continental drift, of her colleagues—notably her lifelong collaborator (and possibly life partner) Bruce Heezen and Observatory director (and sometime antagonist) Maurice Ewing. More than anything else, Soundings provides context for Tharp’s discovery: by the time we’re done, we know how important it was, and why. We’ve been well briefed.

Felt is less successful in building a portrait of Tharp herself. Some areas of her non-work life—her childhood, family and college education, for example—are extremely well covered, but other areas have considerable gaps, particularly those involving her personal life. The nature of Tharp’s relationship with Heezen is only hinted at, as is an early, unsuccessful marriage to someone else. Her later life, supported by a motley gang of eccentrics called Tharpophiles, is also incompletely covered. The elisions, however unintended, are frustrating. I suspect the author was a prisoner of her source material, which in places she follows very closely; I would have liked it if more had been done to fill in the gaps.

Soundings was published in hardcover by Henry Holt in 2012. It’s available in paperback and ebook from Picador.

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For my part, I can’t get lost. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to get lost: that has, in fact, been known to happen. I mean that I can’t allow myself not to know where I am under any circumstances. I’ve got a pretty good cognitive map, but if I’m in a strange city without a map of said city, I’m deeply uncomfortable if not upset; provide me with a map to get my bearings with and I’m immediately at ease. In my case, having an iPhone—with multiple map applications—means I don’t have to get to the nearest map outlet as soon as freaking possible. It’s not, in other words, an either-or situation.

John Edward Huth is firmly in the former camp. He’s a particle physicist at Harvard who’s worked on the Higgs boson who for years has been running an interesting side gig: he teaches a course on what he has called “primitive navigation”—the ancient means of navigating the world that existed prior to the advent of some later technology. The course, and the accompanying book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013), are an exercise in recapturing those methods.

Said methods include some you’d expect: celestial navigation, dead reckoning, the use of a compass; but also some that are much more subtle, that rely on observation and situational awareness—on mindfulness. Understanding how winds, waves and currents work in a given location, or the migration patterns of animals, enables you to use them as natural compasses, or to make corrections in your course—that is, if you pay close attention to them. These are ancient tricks of the trade, not all of which are reliable (moss on the north side of trees) or whose reliability needs to be qualified.

What Huth posits, then, is the need to be connected to and aware of your surroundings—the antithesis, some might say, of staring at a smartphone screen all day. But that connectedness is also stubbornly local: I might know the patterns of winds and birds where I live, but put me on another continent and I’ll flounder. Not everything in this book scales.

The book is a resolutely practical guide, with hundreds of figures, but its most valuable lesson, I suspect, is to demonstrate just how good human beings can become, unaided, at navigating their surroundings—at getting unlost—with practice and skill. It’s something we haven’t needed to do for a while. It’s useful to be able to do it, even if it doesn’t come up very much.

More on Huth and his work from The New Yorker and Harvard Magazine. Also see this YouTube video:

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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.

Amazon | iBooks

The four illustrators who collaborated on The Art of Map Illustration: A Step-by-Step Artistic Exploration of Contemporary Cartography and Mapmaking (Walter Foster, April 2018) use the terms cartography and mapmaking rather differently. These four—James Gulliver Hancock, Hennie Haworth, Stuart Hill and Sarah King—are illustrators first and foremost. Their maps are neither accurate nor detailed; like decorative nautical charts, they’re not for use in navigation, and they say as much at more than one point. But they can also be seen, I think, as the modern-day descendants of the 20th-century pictorial map (about which see Stephen J. Hornsby’s Picturing America, which I reviewed here last November).

The Art of Map Illustration presents itself as a step-by-step guide. But that’s a near-impossible promise to keep, especially in only 144 pages, and it doesn’t. What it does do is have each of its four illustrators take the reader through some of the steps they take from idea to finished product. Though three of the four (Haworth, Hill and Hancock) produce work in the same general idiom—a basic map with illustrated points of interest that are incredibly detailed, using a combination of physical drawing and digital manipulation—each has their own take on it. King, on the other hand, produces distinct typographic maps that are unlike her counterparts’ work in any sense, but much easier to imitate.

The book is colourful and vivid on every single page, and there’s interest in seeing the artists’ work at each stage, but as a guide it’s patchy and suggestive rather than thorough, because to be honest it has to be. I’m not sure how much the reader is expected to know before reading this book: it goes through some pretty basic concepts like paper and pencil sharpening; and Hill, who works digitally, takes a fair bit of time showing us Photoshop menu items and promises additional bonus material online (as of this writing the page is blank update: it’s since been added). But neither is exactly comprehensive: there isn’t enough to get up and running if the reader knows nothing at all about drawing or Photoshop and Illustrator; if the reader does know something, these sections are unnecessary.

Nor do the artists spend much time talking about the why. The theory of their work. The meta. They dive right into the how, using concrete examples of their own work. It’s more showing you how to do it by showing you how they do it, without much self-reflection. To be fair, this isn’t a book about the theory of map illustration, and the intended audience for this book (a) is not me and (b) isn’t as interested in that as I am. But doing map illustration a certain way—this way, rather than that way—is a choice, and without understanding the context of that choice, it’s a bit harder to take what these four idiosyncratic illustrators are doing and make it into something of your own.

I received a review copy from the publisher.

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Part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series, Navigation discusses the tools and methods used by mariners and navigators to find their way across the seas, beginning with various cultures’ ancient navigational techniques, moving through tools like cross-staffs, backstaffs and octants, dealing with the matter of longitude (on which Bennett has some opinions regarding the popular narrative), before wrapping up, too briefly, with modern techologies like radio beacons, inertial navigation and GPS.

There are some illustrations that are a great help in understanding concepts and tools whose use is not immediately obvious, but, as the subtitle suggests, this is not a book that goes into much depth. At only 144 pages—20 percent of which is taken up by front matter, glossary and index—it can only give the barest of introductions to the subject. That can be maddening for the reader, particularly when its coverage is so uneven: there’s a fair bit on the tools and techniques used during the age of sail, but only a paragraph on LORAN and Loran-C, for example. Another frustration is Bennett’s extremely discursive style, as though he were giving a posh invited lecture; I kept feeling that more could have been included had his prose been tightened up.

All the same, there’s value in a book that styles itself, modestly, as an introduction. An introduction is where you begin. It’s the first step, not the finish line. It sets out the parameters of the field and gives you just enough to know what’s out there. For someone like me, it tells me where the gaps are in my knowledge. To paraphrase someone, it lets you know what you do not know. It tells you where to go next: the most useful part of the book may well be its “Further Reading” section; you just need the preceding 116 pages of text to know how to use it.

And for all my concerns about brevity and prose, it’s a good deal more accessible, and easier to read, than the equivalent Wikipedia page—and it went through an editorial process, too. And while it’s not free, it’s very modestly priced. So I have no regrets about buying it.

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The Red Atlas is not the definitive history of those Soviet mapping efforts because so much about those efforts remains a secret. The only reason we know about them is because, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, so many physical copies of those once-highly secret maps fell into the hands of map collectors. The Red Atlas talks about that: for more than a decade, Davies and Kent have been studying those maps. (I’ve been following their work. See the links at the bottom of this post for my earlier posts on the subject.) What they know about the Soviet mapping efforts—sources, methods, their reason for doing it—is extrapolated from the final product of those effort: the maps. The Red Atlas is above all else an exercise in cartographic forensics.

Deciphering the Soviet maps is more than a matter of reading Cyrillic. Soviet maps were standardized, with consistent and highly specific use of symbols and labels that would not necessarily be obvious to the casual map reader. Because these maps had no casual readers: they were secret maps for official use only. You needed to be trained to create or use these maps; the handbook was 220 pages,¹ and there were a number of training posters. Without that training, it would not be immediately obvious that, for example, an underlined town name meant that the nearby train station shared the name,² or that navigable rivers were labelled in uppercase.

The level of detail required by those standards made compiling information in western countries something of a challenge. The extent to which the Soviet maps were copied from existing western sources, based on satellite reconnaissance or derived from on-the-ground observation and surveillance is something The Red Atlas delves into in some detail.

If The Red Atlas suffers from being too anglocentric—too focused on Soviet maps of the United States and Great Britain—it may be because the authors spent time comparing and contrasting the Soviet maps with their USGS and Ordnance Survey counterparts. On the one hand, the Soviet maps so resembled the Ordnance Survey’s work that the OS moved to block their use in the United Kingdom.³ On the other hand, there are differences, even outright errors, that come from the Soviets’ attempts to reconcile different sources (places that no longer existed, but appeared on older maps), linguistic or cultural confusion and misunderstanding, and differences in emphasis on the part of Soviet mapmakers (who assigned greater importance to railways and heavy industry than western mapmakers would).

And there is clear evidence that the Soviets did do their own mapmaking, such as military installations left blank on OS maps or under-detailed by the USGS mapped in intricate detail on the Soviet maps. There are also, here and there, attempts to include data that were standard on Soviet maps that did not normally appear on an OS Explorer or USGS quad map—notably bridge information (length, width, clearance, carrying capacity, what it’s built of), river flow direction and speed, and the width, in metres, of roads. That data could only come from on-the-ground surveying. As the authors speculate, these data suggest maps intended for administrative use rather than to support a military invasion.

The Red Atlas is a truly handsome book, filled with dozens of examples of Soviet mapmaking. For someone interested in the Cold War and spycraft, it’d make a hell of a gift this season. But as you have probably figured out by now, this is not, despite its name, a true atlas. We are given examples of Soviet cartography. Lots and lots of examples. The point of the book is to puzzle out, based on the too-fragmetary evidence in our hands, what Soviet cartography looked like, and how it (likely) was made. What we get is tantalizing. It isn’t enough. But, barring a sea change in Russia, it’s all we’re likely to get for some time.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher.

Previously: Soviet Topo Maps; Old Russian Maps; Soviet Spies Map the World; Soviet Mapping Update; Soviet-Era Topo Maps of Russian Cities; Soviet Spy Maps, Redux.

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Because pictorial maps were artistic rather than scientific, Hornsby argues, they were ignored as a subject of cartographic study—“treated as ephemera, the flotsam and jetsam of an enormous sea of popular culture.”¹ As such they have not been preserved to the same extent as more strictly cartographic maps. (Being printed on cheap acid paper didn’t help.) But as products of popular culture they were distinctive—and ubiquitous. “By World War II,” he writes, “pictorial maps had created a powerful visual image of the United States and were beginning to reimagine the look of the world for a mass consumer audience.”² They were so prevalent, I suppose, that they were invisible. Taken for granted. It frequently falls to the historian of popular culture to point out that the common and everyday is, in fact, significant. That’s what Hornsby is doing here.

Drawing mainly on the holdings of the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, which served as the final home of pictorial map collections assembled by librarians like Ethel M. Fair and Muriel H. Parry, Hornsby explores the history of the pictorial map genre from the 1920s to the 1960s. Influenced by nineteenth-century advertising and bird’s-eye maps, as well as the work of MacDonald Gill, the illustrators of pictorial maps—Charles H. Owens, Jo Mora, Ernest Dudley Chase, George Annand, Ilonka Karasz, C. Eleanor Hall—created advertisements, posters, brochures, and maps for news organizations. In many ways their work was the infographics of their time; like medieval mappae mundi or early modern maps with sea monsters, pictorial maps were able to impart a good deal of qualitative information that would otherwise be unmappable, and with a distinctive artistic flair.³

After fifty-four pages of essay describing and analyzing his subject matter, Hornsby moves on to six sections of plates, beautifully reproduced, organized by theme rather than by date or artist: Maps to Amuse (maps featuring cartoons, maps that exaggerate one state at the expense of the rest); Maps to Instruct; Maps of Place and Region (including city maps that can be seen as the direct successor to bird’s-eye maps, only with a lot more colour and whimsy); Maps of Industry (tourism maps, rail and shipping maps, industrial promotion), Maps of War (where oblique views of the globe came into fashion), and Maps for Postwar America.

That last section highlights an important fact about pictorial maps: they were very much a generational project. Pictorial maps waned as these illustrators retired or passed on and as photography gained traction in commercial art.⁴ Which highlights Hornsby’s point that pictorial maps were a coherent genre, born out of common influences and the creation of a specific group of people, at a specific moment of time. Picturing America recaptures that whimsical, vibrant, beautiful moment.

For more on Picturing America, see All Over the Map’s profile from last March.

I received a review copy from the publisher.

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This seems as good an excuse as any to take a closer look at You Are Here: NYC. Past time, actually, since I’ve had a review copy in my hands for a year now.

You Are Here: NYC is the third of Katharine Harmon’s map books. The first, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, came out in 2003, the second, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, in 2010. Harmon’s distinctive style in editing and curating these books, carries over to the present volume.

First, none of the art is presented bare: Harmon provides one or more full paragraphs providing background and context; like its predecessors, You Are Here: NYC is also peppered with short essays by guest contributors discussing specific pieces in more depth.

Second, Harmon has an expansive view of what constitutes art. There is a great deal of the sort of art that hangs in galleries, but sculptures, textiles and physical installations (represented photographically) are also included. There are also many examples of functional but beautiful maps: not just illustrated works like bird’s-eye maps or pictorial maps, but even geologic maps, maps rendered by computer, and more. Even the Mannahatta Project is included.

And third, Harmon juxtaposes the maps in ways you might not expect: an 1859 map is presented face-to-face with a map from 1967; the maps have nothing to do with one another except that their designs have resonant similarities. These similarities are found across styles of art as well as centuries: nautical charts and fire insurance maps are mixed in with the deliberately artistic and the whimsical.

Fine and good. That Harmon applies her method to maps of a single city may raise eyebrows. Can a single city provide enough material—enough art, enough maps—to fill a volume? Yes, if the city is New York. To map a city like New York is to map a living organism: it comes down to the significance of You Are Here: NYC‘s subtitle (or sub-subtitle): Mapping the Soul of the City. As I wrote in my review of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, “Not every city has a soul: some are decidedly soulless. But while I’ve never been to San Francisco, it seems to me that it, at least, is one that does. Cities like that can be magical places: they don’t just have histories, but mythologies, too.” I’ve never been to New York, but I recognize it in Harmon’s pages. I see its pulse, its breath. There are a few other cities in the world that could also generate sufficient artistic and cartographic grist for Harmon’s mill. But not many.

I received a review copy from the publisher’s Canadian distributor.

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It turns out that A History of Canada in Ten Maps isn’t really a book about maps, or mapmaking, but exploration. For Shoalts, the maps are the evidentiary traces of the stories he really wants to tell. In nine of the ten cases, those are stories of Canada’s exploration; in the tenth, a key battle of the War of 1812. Combined, those stories form a mosaic tale of nation-building, one that supports the kind of national mythmaking that the previous government in Canada was particularly fond of.

Each story, from the Vikings’ earliest explorations of North America, through the journeys of the inland explorers of the fur trade to the Franklin expedition, is engagingly told. Shoalts does know how to spin a tale. Drawing on contemporary accounts, explorers’ journals and letters, he recounts fairly traditional narratives of the various expeditions that are nonetheless vivid and bracing: we feel the starvation, the privation, the threat, the cold. But from an historiographical perspective this book neither breaks new ground nor adds anything to our understanding. In terms of method it’s a bit of a throwback: it centres significant historical figures who are hardly unknown to Canadians: Champlain, Radisson, Hearne, Mackenzie, Thompson and so forth. It could have been published a half-century ago without raising any eyebrows.

Readers expecting something about maps will be disappointed. Despite the title, this is not the Canadian version of Jerry Brotton’s History of the World in Twelve Maps. In most chapters the maps get only the briefest of mentions, sometimes less than a paragraph; and sometimes their connection to the enterprise being described is somewhat tenuous or after the fact. As a narrative conceit, shaping the history of the exploration of Canada around a set of maps is not a bad one, but Shoalts fails to meet the expectations he himself has raised. In the end, I think he ended up being led by his primary sources, telling the stories they wanted to tell rather than the story his own structure demanded.

A History of Canada in Ten Maps is available in hardcover in Canada and as an ebook in both Canada and the United States (Kindle, iBooks).

(Image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

When Alex Acks vents about fantasy maps, it’s because the mountain ranges in Middle-earth don’t make sense, not because the cartography of Pauline Baynes or Christopher Tolkien wasn’t up to the task. It’s more that the territory is shaped to fit the story rather than the other way around, less that the maps of said territory frequently lack a scale. When Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza says that “Game of Thrones has such a terrible map it could be presented as a parody of bad fantasy maps,” he’s not saying that the cartography of the various Song of Ice and Fire mapmakers, such as Jonathan Roberts (The Lands of Ice and Fire), James Sinclair (books one through four) or Jeffrey L. Ward (A Dance with Dragons), is deficient. He’s saying that the Game of Thrones geography is terrible.

“Fantasy maps,” writes Adrian Daub, “are invented, but not all that inventive. Virtually all of them repeat certain features. The way coastlines, mountain ranges, and islands are arranged follows rules. For instance: a surprising number of fantasy worlds contain vast landmasses in the east, but only an endless ocean to the west.”¹

They’re not critiquing the map, they’re critiquing the territory.

I’ve seen this before. When people talk about their favourite fantasy maps, they’re not actually talking about their favourite work of cartography; they’re talking about a map of their favourite fantasy place. Harry Potter fans like the Marauder’s Map because it’s a Harry Potter map, not because it’s a particularly fine example of fantasy cartography.

And if in certain critical circles the fantasy map has a rather bad reputation, it’s not because of the quality of the cartography. It’s because fantasy novels are expected to come with maps. It’s become a cliché, thanks to multi-volume epic fantasy series that are basically derivative Tolkien clones: Tolkien had maps, so they have to as well. The presence of a map at the front of a fantasy novel signifies that this fantasy novel is the kind that comes with a map, i.e., an epic fantasy series. Whether you like or dislike fantasy maps often comes down to whether you like or dislike those kinds of books.

In all of this the question of the maps themselves gets elided a bit. If fantasy maps are bad because they’re ubiquitous, because they’re often unnecessary, or because they depict a risibly unconvincing terrain, are they also bad because of their design? As I said earlier, we’ve conflated the map with the territory, in a way that real-world cartographers would find confusing: your opinion of a map of Italy doesn’t depend on whether the Boot is a convincing example of a peninsula.

This is an example of a bad fantasy map:

But why is it a bad fantasy map? Is it bad because the terrain is so ridiculously, implausibly mountainous? Or is it bad because the cartography is so poor? The map is drowning in undifferentiated hill signs: is that a fault of the author’s cartography or of his geography?

Which brings up the question of fantasy map design. “What does a fantasy map look like?”—or more to the point, “What is a fantasy map supposed to look like?”—is a question I get a lot, especially from beginner fantasy writers who want to Get It Right. I always demur, partly because I don’t want to set myself up as the judge of such things, partly because I don’t want to perpetuate fantasy clichés, and partly because I’m not actually sure. Because it turns out that for the most part, fantasy map design is unexplored territory.

In his study of fantasy maps and settings, Here Be Dragons, Stefan Ekman talks a little bit about it: using a sample of fantasy maps, he explores whether and how often various cartographic elements, like hill signs or cartouches, are present. His study allowed him to make the following remarks about the “typical” fantasy map:

In brief, a typical fantasy map portrays a secondary world, a compass rose or similar device showing its orientation with north at the top. It is not set in any given hemisphere (not necessarily in a spherical world at all), although there are reasons to believe that clues in the text would indicate north as the direction of colder climates. Apart from topographical map elements such as rivers, bays, islands, and mountains, such a map would also contain towns and other artificial constructions. The hill signs used are typically pre-Enlightenment (either profile or oblique).

Even this brief list reveals the mixture of modern and historical map features. Like much high fantasy, the secondary-world maps follow a pseudomedieval aesthetic according to which dashes of pre-Enlightenment mapping conventions are rather routinely added to a mostly modern creation. Whether this is because of careless research, genre conformity, lack of imagination, or a desire to give the reader the easiest possible access to the map and the world it portrays is hard to say.²

In the end, it’s tautological: fantasy maps are designed to look like fantasy maps. An endless series of variations on a single theme: as the inadvertent holotype for maps of derivative fantasy worlds, Christopher Tolkien’s original map of Middle-earth has a lot to answer for. We talk about fantasy map geography—the territory—because insofar as the cartography is concerned, there’s very little to say.

Because what a fantasy map looks like is received wisdom. And more to the point, that received wisdom is accepted without question or second thought. For an example of this, consider the many examples of real-world maps done “in the style of fantasy maps.” An incomplete list would include Samuel Fisher’s maps of Australia, Great Britain, Iceland and the United States on Reddit; Callum Ogden’s map of Europe “in a Fantasy Tolkien Style”; and map prints sold at Etsy stores like CartoArt, Mapsburgh and Parnasium.

We know these are done in the fantasy map style because, like obscenity, we know it when we see it. The trouble is that we don’t seem to be able to enunciate what that style is, where it comes from, or what the rules are. There’s a design language here, but the rules are understood, sometimes a bit subconsciously, rather than perceived.

Read Callum Ogden’s article on how he created the Lord of the Rings-style map of Scotland and you realize that what’s going on here is mimicry: the quality of the map depends on skill of the mimic and the quality of the original being mimicked. The problem there is that sometimes the original is itself a copy. Like an extruded-product fantasy trilogy based on a warmed-over D&D campaign, the final result is just a few too many steps away from anything vaguely resembling original source material.

If you want an example of how this can happen, consider a book that ought to be about fantasy map design, but isn’t: Jared Blando’s How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps (Impact, 2015) is about fantasy map execution. That important difference means that Blando’s book operates on the shared assumptions behind the default fantasy map design, but does not define, explain or interrogate them. Rather, this is a book that will hold the hand of people who want to make their maps look like fantasy maps—the people asking me to tell them what their map should look like will find in this book the answer they’re looking for, but not necessarily the answer they need.

Lavishly illustrated, How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps is not a manual for professional artists or cartographers; the intended audience is signalled in the book’s subtitle: Step by Step Cartography for Gamers and Fans. (To be honest, my study of fantasy maps has ignored the vast quantities of mapmaking done for role-playing games, both published and homebrewed. I had to draw the line somewhere.) As a guide to mapmaking it’s less useful than you might expect. Blando’s method is to start with the blank page and add, one after the other, the various elements until the map is finished. Start with the basic shape of the continent, then refine the coastline. Add detail like lakes, islands and bays. Trace the line of the mountain range, then add detail. Start with a basic drawing, then add detail. It’s the fantasy map equivalent of drawing everything by starting with a bunch of circles.

While the book assumes a shared understanding of what a fantasy map ought to look like, within those parameters it isn’t prescriptivist. The author does not lay down rules: elements are described as fun, a great way of adding something to the map, and so forth.³ It’s really up to you. And in the context of a private D&D campaign, there’s really nothing wrong with this approach: Blando is basically giving gamers a list of elements to include on the maps of their campaigns, and getting out of their way.

But the fantasy map method is not limited to role-playing games: there’s plenty of genetic exchange between game worlds and novel worlds. Games have become novels, and vice versa. With the short shrift given to landforms in Blando’s guide, it’s easy to see where critiques of fantasy geographies like Acks’s can come from: a map whose creation started with “draw a simple shape” is only going to result in a geologically or geographically plausible continent by accident.

In other words, it’s not the map that’s the problem, it’s the mapmaking process. It’s not the cartography, it’s the act of creation.

We can’t expect Blando’s beginner-level drawing guide to serve as a primer for fantasy cartography. But it offers a possible explanation as to how the fantasy map making process yields a map that ends up being called terrible: as an example of how fantasy map shibboleths are invisibly received and propagated, and of what fantasy mapmakers don’t think about, it is, ironically, quite revealing.

(Featured image: Impact Books)

“Although maps have formed part of the Bodleian’s collections from early on, they have been collected actively only since around 1800,” Hall writes in the introduction. Broadly speaking, the Bodleian’s map holdings come from a combination of bequests and legal deposit requirements. The latter in particular means that the Bodleian’s holdings of British maps—including virtually every Ordnance Survey map and a large number of commercially published maps—are very extensive. The bequests are sometimes much better known: maps named for their owners and donors rather than their creators—the Gough Map, the Selden Map—falling into the Bodleian’s hands.

Hall organizes her selection—some 75 maps—into seven chapters organized by theme: Travel and Exploration, Knowledge and Science, Pride and Ownership, Maps of War, The City in Maps, Maps for Fun, and Imaginary Lands. Sometimes those themes make for unlikely juxtapositions: Hall mentions the Tabula Peutingeriana and American highway maps in very nearly the same breath; and Maps for Fun, a chapter dealing with tourism, recreation and travel, includes a 15th-century Holy Land pilgrimage map—Reuwich’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam—alongside the MountMaps 3D Navigator Map. But apart from that the chapters present us with some very interesting maps indeed: Travel and Exploration gives us the Gough and Selden maps; Knowledge and Science discusses Mercator, Ortelius and early astronomical maps, John Speed, Christopher Saxton and the Ordnance Survey; Maps of War gives us fortifications and plans, siege and trench maps, but also silk escape maps of World War II; Imaginary Lands ranges from Hole’s Poly-Olbion maps to Leo Belgicus, Tolkien and Lewis, and the art of Layla Curtis.

We get, in other words, a taste of just about everything—but only a taste. The breadth of Treasures of the Map Room is both a blessing and a curse. We’re made aware of the volume and diversity of the Bodleian’s map holdings, but we never get a chance to drill down beyond the most cursory of examinations, never more than one example of something. On the other hand, Hall’s approach brings to the fore maps that might not otherwise be included in books like this—books that can privilege the rare and the ancient over the more mundane but more significant. For example, the map I found myself staring at the most was the 1864 Ordnance Plan of the Crystal Palace and its Environs, a 1:2,500 map of incredible detail and delicacy. You might find yourself lingering over some other map. Discoveries like this are, I suspect, the whole point of book that is, after all, about a library’s hidden treasures.

I received a review copy from the North American distributor for this book, the University of Chicago Press.

Treasures of the Map Room edited by Debbie Hall (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016). Hardcover, 224 pp., £35/$60. ISBN 978-1-85124-2504. Buy at Amazon.

Previously: Treasures from the Map Room.

Like the Atlas of Cursed Places (reviewed here), Atlas Obscura is not an atlas per se. There are maps, but they exist to locate the subjects of the essays that make up this book. Those subjects—those weird and wonderful places—also appear on the website, but the essays are different; in the sample I compared, the book’s version is considerably briefer and more dense. This is to be expected: when you have fewer than 500 pages to work with, you have to make some zero-sum editorial decisions. Fewer, more fulsome pieces, or more pieces of shorter length. Atlas Obscura has opted for the latter, with pieces that are frustratingly, tantalizingly brief, each followed by a little information on how to get there (or, in some cases, whether you can get there). Even then only a fraction of the places that appear online appear between the book’s covers.

But browsing a website is not the same experience as reading a book. No one would try to go through the entire Atlas Obscura database; the book allows for a big-picture look at the sort of thing found there. A curated subset, as I said above. A taster’s menu. The book also rewards serendipity and pleasant surprises: whether you’re reading from beginning to end (as I did for this review), looking for specific continents, regions or countries, or flipping through pages at random, you’re bound to encounter an entry you hadn’t expected to come across. If there’s value in a hard-copy (or electronic: Kindle, iBooks) version of something freely available online in expanded form, it’s here. And let me be clear: that’s not nothing.

I received an electronic advance review copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Buy Atlas Obscura via Amazon or iBooks.

Related: Map Books of 2016.

Ricci (1552–1610) and Verbiest (1623–1688) were both Jesuit priests, in China to spread Christianity; their maps, produced in collaboration with Chinese calligraphers, artists and printers, produced a fundamental rethinking of China’s place in the world. Not that China wasn’t at the centre of these maps, as the essays in the accompanying catalogue point out, but these maps filled out the rest of the world, which was previously a marginal afterthought in Chinese cartography.

Ricci’s map, A Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World or Kun yu wan guo quan tu (坤輿萬國全圖), is the better known of the two. It’s the first map in Chinese to depict the Americas, and has been called the “Impossible Black Tulip” due to its rarity and importance. A synthesis of European and Chinese traditions, it uses a pseudocylindrical map projection and was printed on mulberry paper panels from six large blocks of wood.

The 1602 map was Ricci’s third or fourth world map, made for the Wanli Emperor; only six examples are known to exist today. The copy on display at the Asian Art Museum is on loan from the James Bell Ford Trust, and is famous in its own right: the Trust paid $1 million for it in 2009; though owned by the Trust, it’s normally part of the collection of the University of Minnesota’s James Bell Ford Library. Before arriving in Minnesota it went on display at the Library of Congress, which made the high-resolution scan you see above. (Of the other five, three are in Japanese libraries, one is in a Vatican library, and one is in private hands.)

On the other hand, the Verbiest map, called A Complete Map of the World or Kun yu quan tu (坤輿全圖), has never been on display before, though the exhibition’s copy has been owned by the Library of Congress since 1930 (see scan above). Based on Blaeu’s then-recent world map (but reversing the hemispheres to put China closer to the centre), the Verbiest map displayed the world in two hemispheres. It was somewhat smaller than the Ricci map, and was mounted on eight scrolls. About half a dozen or so complete examples remain today.

Both maps were produced by Jesuit priests working in China, whose knowledge of the wider world was seen as a wedge: useful knowledge that would go hand in hand with their Christian mission. The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition explains this in some detail. China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps is edited by Natasha Reichle and contains three essays: one by Ricci Institute director Antoni Üçerler on the role played by missionaries to China in disseminating knowledge in both directions; one by Theodore N. Foss on the Ricci map; and one by Mark Stephen Mir on the Verbiest map. The first essay provides context; the latter two go into detail about the priests, their background, their time in China, and the maps that today are known by their names.

At 64 pages, the book is slim, but the essays are useful and enlightening, and it’s full of lovely illustrations, including close-up details of the two maps, and printed on heavy paper. Most importantly, it has foldout pages with reproductions of the Ricci and Verbiest maps in their entirety. It was published yesterday and is available now for $19.95 (though as usual you can get it for less at Amazon).

I received a review copy of China at the Center from the Museum.

Previously on the Ricci Map: Time on Ricci; NY Times on Ricci Map Exhibition; 1602 Ricci Map Now on Display; “Impossible Black Tulip” Coming to the University of Minnesota.