Constructed in the 1680s for Louis XIV, and measuring nearly four metres in diameter and weighing a couple of tons apiece, Vincenzo Coronelli’s great globes “are a simply amazing celestial and terrestrial pair,” writes Matthew Edney, who saw them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2019. But, he goes on to say,

[T]he globes were effectively useless. Their imposing grandeur made them completely the wrong size to be used effectively. Smaller globes—made with diameters between 0.075–1.7m (3–67″)—could be easily turned to show specific parts of their convex surface. Or, people could enter within much larger globes, called georamas, turning themselves around as necessary to see all parts of the earth on the concave interior surface. Coronelli’s globes were far too large for the former, and far too small for the latter.

This unavoidable reality inverted the usual physical relationship between viewers and globes, undermining the viewer’s usual sense of intellectual domination and converting the globe-viewing experience to one of awe and amazement. As a result, no-one really knew quite what to do with them[.]

Their difficult size and limited utility is why they’ve spent most of their 340-year existence hidden from view, though they’ve been on display since 2005 at the BNF’s François-Mitterrand site (see the above BNF video, in French).

I’ve been struggling for months now on how to deal with Arno Peters and his world map. Every time I turn to the subject, I just get bogged down by the complexity of the scattered and multifaceted literature, by the insanity of much of Peters’ map work, and by the different responses to his work. […] After at least three tries to say something new, and floundering each time, I am presenting this blog entry simply as an attempt to organize the information about Peters in a way that makes sense to me, which is to say historically. Think of it as a long bibliographical essay based on what I have to hand (so not comprehensive, especially in the German-language literature). I’m not sure that it says anything necessarily new or significant. So please join me as I go through a series of cuts at Peters and his map work.

Matthew Edney has a post on Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, about which we have seen much already; Edney’s look is deeper and more analytical. “Of special interest to me is how, despite his overtly anti-modernist subject matter and style, Sleigh nonetheless gave structure and system to his fictive panorama by giving it the trappings of normative maps and of realistic imagery more generally.”

Previously: An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland; North of Nowhere: The Osher’s Fantasy Map Exhibition.

Kent previously co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography (Routledge, 2017) with Peter Vujakovic (previously), and co-authored The Red Atlas (University of Chicago Press, 2017) with John Davies (my review).

This means that all five volumes that have been published to date can be downloaded for free (here). The remaining volume—volume five, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century—is in preparation. When that final book is published, it will close out a project that has taken more than four decades to come to fruition.

Previously: Forty Years of the History of Cartography Project; The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

The rule of thumb is that an item is vintage if it’s more than 40 years old, and antique if it’s more than 100 years old. (That tan-coloured Replogle globe with South Sudan on it? Not antique.) Time runs faster on the web, though: something 20 years old feels geologically ancient. Running a 20-year-old blog in 2023 feels like keeping a pet coelacanth: you’re keeping a living fossil alive.

As social media approaches what may well be its extinction event, there’s been a lot of talk about “bringing back blogs.” Um, blogs never went away: Kottke.org just marked its 25th anniversary, and there are still plenty of websites out there powered by WordPress or something similar that don’t call themselves blogs. What faded away, I think, was the idea of, and self-identification as, a blogger. Lots of people started blogs in the format’s early years but didn’t keep up with them; social media was a better fit for what they wanted to do. Not many people start a blog qua blog to be a blogger nowadays. But institutions still post updates in blog form, and experts share their insights on platforms that blur the lines between blog, social media and newsletter.

(Certainly the map blog never went away: we still have general-interest blogs like Maps Mania and Lat × Long; industry and academic figures like Matthew Edney, Kenneth Field and James Killick regularly post commentary and links; and plenty of working cartographers share their latest creations on blogging platforms as well.¹)

The Map Room is not an institution, nor am I an expert. No really: I’m not. The idea that someone with an intense interest in a subject but not much knowledge could start a blog as a way to explore the subject—“an exercise in self-education” is what I called it—was something that made sense in 2003. It might be a bit more archaic now.² I am also, twenty years on, rather more self-educated: I understand what I’m linking to more than I used to, and I’ve seen enough to know when to be skeptical. I’ve called bullshit on more than one occasion. I still can’t make a map of my own (there’s an alternate universe in which I’m making a perfectly happy living as a freelance cartographer), but my appreciation for them is all the richer for having spent two decades at this.

Previously: Emma Willard’s History of the United States; Women in Cartography (Part 3).

Meanwhile, for even more titles, see Matthew Edney’s Map History Books of 2021.

The key issue is that over many centuries, maps have routinely been removed from their original contexts without clear records being kept. These practices have been extensively countered and halted since the 1970s, however they have left a legacy that requires great effort to overcome. But that effort always pays off: resituating early maps in the original contexts of their production, circulation, and use inevitably allows for more new interpretations of their meaning and significance.

Previously: The History of Cartography’s Fourth Volume, Now (Almost) Out; History of Cartography Project Updates.

This isn’t the first time the magazine has done this: the September-October 2016 issue (2.9 MB) was also almost entirely dedicated to maps. Previously: Library of Congress Magazine’s Map Issue.

But that’s not to say that I haven’t picked up some knowledge: I’ve turned my longstanding interest in fantasy maps into a few published articles (with more still in the works or in press), so I will concede the point on that front. But in general what I do have is exposure. Over the past 18 years I have seen just about everything to do with maps, and so I know a little bit about just about everything. Not enough to be employed at any map-related job, but 18 years of paying attention, of synthesizing everything I’ve seen and read, has afforded me some perspective.

Enough to call out obvious horseshit when I see it.

Also, because I’m not a cartographer, because I don’t have that background or training, because my expertise is a hundred miles wide but a millimetre thick, I’d be extraordinarily reluctant to tell cartographers that what they’ve been doing for the past few centuries has been completely wrong, and that I’ve come up with something better that no one has ever thought of before—only for the something better to be utterly old and familiar to those who know what they’re doing.

I don’t have that kind of chutzpah.

Arno Peters did, though. In 1974 the German historian presented the Peters World Map (a retread of an 1855 equal-area projection by James Gall) as the antidote to a Mercator projection that emphasized temperate regions over the tropics: the Global West over the Global South. In doing so Peters was fighting a battle that, Mark Monmonier has argued, was mostly already won by the 1970s. The Mercator had long been seen as unsuitable for world maps, with wall maps and atlases already having moved on to the Goode’s homolosine, Mollweide and Van der Grinten projections, among others, by the mid-20th century.

Even so, cartographers generally hated the Peters map because it was foundationally ignorant: Peters was dabbling in map projections without understanding their history. He and his adherents invented a false dichotomy—Peters vs. Mercator—and marketed the projection to credulous audiences (e.g. Boston schools as recently as four years ago) as a solution to a problem that in truth was neither unsolved nor really a problem.

Guess what? It’s happening again.

In 2007 a pair of physicists, David Goldberg and J. Richard Gott, published an article in Cartographica in which they proposed a way of measuring and scoring map projections by six kinds of distortion—area, shape, distance, boundary cuts, flexion and skewness (the latter referring to bending and lopsidedness). According to their system, the Winkel Tripel projection, currently in use at National Geographic, had the best score: 4.563. (The lower the score, the better: a globe’s score is zero. The Mercator’s score is 8.296.)

Last month, in an unpublished paper uploaded to Arxiv, Goldberg and Gott, along with Robert Vanderbei, tried to come up with something better than the Winkel Tripel, and arrived at a pair of azimuthal equidistant projections centred on each pole and extending to the equator; the twist, as they see it, is to make the map double sided.

“To the best of their knowledge,” says the piece from Princeton’s communications office, “no one has ever made double-sided maps for accuracy like this before. A 1993 compendium of nearly 200 map projections dating back 2,000 years did not include any, nor did they find any similar patents.”

Except that maps showing the world in two hemispheres date back at least as far as the 16th century (there’s one on my wall) and polar azimuthal projections aren’t exactly new either: they’re splitting hairs awfully fine to make that claim. Regardless, their double-sided map gets a score of 0.881 on their Goldberg-Gott scale.

Matthew Edney was not impressed; as you might expect, he did not hold back. “I am utterly and thoroughly gobsmacked,” he wrote last month in a piece that marvels at the claims made in the PR piece.

Underpinning all this sheer stupidity and naivety are some serious points about what these astrophysicists understand maps to be. It is not that they are ignorant of the mathematical principles; two have published a paper in a map journal on their measures of map distortion (Goldberg and Gott 2007; also Gott, Mugnolo, and Colley 2007). But it seems that from their highly mathematicized perch they have realized that world maps are actually useful for imaging and visualizing the world. But they want the maps to also be as accurate as possible, according to their own idiosyncratic criteria. […]

Ultimately, once one has stripped away the immense amount of PR guff and hyperbole, there’s little to recommend this as a “new” and “different”—other than the proposal to paste the two halves together. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand-held fan with hemispheres drawn on either side …

They have really only reinvented the wheel.

In a separate piece Edney has some questions about the parameters used in Goldberg and Gott’s scoring system, a couple of which he finds dubious, along with the way they’re tallied up.

Someone coming in from outside the field to “solve” the map projection problem sounds an awful lot like Arno Peters all over again—especially since their little paper has picked up a certain amount of media attention—see coverage from The Verge and the New York Times—that trumpets the possibility that this projection “fixes” flat maps, or the distorted view of the world that we get from flat maps.

Hoo boy. That’s a hell of a claim—one we’ve seen before. Except that Peters purported to solve map projections’ problem of representation. These professors sound like they’re going after the impossible Holy Grail of map projections: to find the most perfect, least distorted map, the One True Map that will leave all others in its dust, the One Projection that can be used all the time and in every circumstance. (The number of questions I’ve seen on Quora, for example, that insist upon this impossibility—that there is such a thing as an “accurate” map projection—is striking.)

Only they’ve defined “most accurate” as “fewest distortions according to our own criteria.” In doing so they’ve reduced map projections to a simple math problem that ignores centuries of map history, to say nothing of real-world uses. In other words: a spherical cow—a model reduced to the point of oversimplification so that it works.

Because you’d be hard pressed to find an actual use case for their double-sided map of the world. As Edney points out, only half of the world is viewable at once: “The point of world maps is to show the whole earth, but one can’t see the entire earth, so the most accurate world map doesn’t show the whole earth” (which somehow doesn’t incur a penalty in their schema). And heaven forbid you should want your world map to show all of Africa, or South America, or Indonesia, at the same time.

Thing is—and regular readers will know I’m preaching to the choir here—there is no such thing as the perfect map projection. Only the right projection for the job at hand. The antidote to a given map projection’s distortion is a different map projection whose distortion is less problematic for what you’re trying to map. Some distortions you can live with in order to preserve fidelity elsewhere. I’m fond of the Equal Earth projection, but I wouldn’t use it if I wanted to emphasize the polar regions.

It’s a practical choice, in other words, one that I’ve come to understand, from my 18 years of paying attention to this, as a basic challenge of map design. One that you can’t simply come in and solve with math. It’s tempting to see this as a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect—or at least the popular understanding of it: an inability to recognize your lack of ability—that in my experience seems to afflict an awful lot of physicists and engineers. Reduce the problem until it’s solvable, then solve it.

First, assume a spherical cow.

Interesting as an exercise, but not particularly useful.

Australian author and illustrator Kathleen Jennings will teach a workshop on fantasy mapmaking in June: the focus of Map Making and World Building is “on story and art,” the mapmaking illustrative rather than cartographical, and in general it seems to be about the relationship between map and story. The workshop will take place on 19 June both in-person (at the Queensland Writers Centre in Brisbane) and via livestream; tickets range from A$35 to A$100, depending.

A History of Maps and Mapping, a short introductory online course taught by Katherine Parker as part of the London Rare Books School’s program of summer courses, “will challenge students to destabilize and broaden the traditional definition of ‘map’, and to recognize maps as socially constructed objects that are indicative of the values and biases of their makers and the cultures that created them. Students will learn how to analyse and catalogue maps for a variety of research purposes, and to discuss changes in map technology and style without recourse to a progressive narrative of scientific improvement.” Matthew Edney will supply a guest lecture. The course runs from 29 June to 2 July and costs £100 (student) or £175.

Mapping Maine: The Land and Its Peoples, 1677-1842, an exhibition of maps celebrating Maine’s bicentennial while acknowledging the Wabanaki presence and history in the space that became Maine, opens today at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education. The online component is here; there is a physical exhibition in the OML’s gallery, but visitors are limited to a maximum of four per one-hour timeslot: details here. Curated by Matthew Edney, the exhibition runs until 31 March 2021.

COVD-19 is hitting the United States very hard right now. This interactive map from the Harvard Global Health Institute measures COVID-19 risk at the county level. The four colour-coded risk levels are based on a seven-day rolling average of new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people: less than one means green (“on track for containment”); more than 25 means red (“tipping point”). It’s explained here. [Matthew Edney]

As with other volumes of the project, it’s a massive piece of work: two physical volumes and nearly two thousand pages. Edited by Matthew H. Edney and Mary Spondberg Pedley and featuring the work of more than 200 contributors, this book “offers a comprehensive overview of the cartographic practices of Europeans, Russians, and the Ottomans, both at home and in overseas territories, from 1650 to 1800.”

I say “nominally” because, Edney reports, “the entire print run of the book is being held at the printers in Manitoba until the pandemic recedes and there is someone at the press warehouse to receive the shipment and get the hard copies into everyone’s hands. So, please be patient.” The ebook version is in preparation.

The History of Cartography Project is being published a bit out of sequence. Volume six, covering the twentieth century, came out in 2015. Still to come is volume five, which covers the nineteenth century. Volume five editor Roger Kain has some thoughts on the history of the History of Cartography project.

While quite expensive to purchase, each volume is made available for free download on the History of Cartography project website 24 months after publication. Volumes one through three and six are available now; check back for volume four in the spring of 2022.

Previously: History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Out; History of Cartography Project’s Sixth Volume Now Available Online; History of Cartography Project Updates.

The History of Cartography, Volume 4: Cartography in the European Enlightenment
edited by Matthew H. Edney and Mary Spondberg Pedley
University of Chicago Press, April 2020
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

Kera Till’s “Commuting in Corona Times” is a transit map of the new normal. More at Untapped New York.

On a personal level, the coronavirus map I stare at the most is the one closest to home: a dashboard that shows the regional incidence of COVID-19 in Quebec. Maintained by two geographers at Laval University, it’s extremely helpful in that it shows the per capita rate as well as the raw numbers, which highlights (for example) just how many cases there are in the Eastern Townships, and how few there are here in the Outaouais, as a percentage of the population. [Le Droit]

Less helpful is New York City’s map showing the percentage of patients testing positive for COVID-19, because its neighbourhood detail is so difficult to interpret, as Patch’s Kathleen Culliton points out. “Neighborhoods are designated by numbers instead of name—408 is Jamaica, Queens, by the way—and the percentages are not connected to population data but to those tested. The number of people tested per zone? Not included. The population [per] zone? Not included.” [Kenneth Field]

It’s hard to maintain social distancing in a dense urban environment like New York, but that doesn’t mean that rural areas are inherently safer. Identifying areas that would be hit harder by the coronavirus can be a factor of age and various social vulnerability factors (such as poverty and vehicle access); John Nelson looks at the intersection of age and social vulnerability in this StoryMap and this blog post. The Washington Post’s maps of vulnerability are based on age and flu rates. A third example is Jvion’s COVID Community Vulnerability Map, which is based on anonymized health data from some 30 million Americans [ZDNet].

The New York Times maps the number of cases at the global level and for the United States. It’s also making available county-level coronavirus data assembled from various states and counties, since there seems to be no single agency tracking this at the national level.

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020

Failing to observe social distancing makes the pandemic worse. You might have seeen Tectonix’s video on Twitter, drawn from the location data of mobile devices that were active at a single beach in Florida over spring break, and followed them home. As CTV News reports, the video has drawn fire from privacy advocates, though Tectonix asserts that the data was anonymized and collected with user consent. Meanwhile, the New York Times explores several scenarios of coronavirus spread, comparing what might happen with some control measures, more severe control measures, and no action taken at all.

For mapmakers: Matthew Edney on how and how not to map the COVID-19 pandemic. Kenneth Field on using coxcomb charts (memory-intenstive example here) and waffle grids to map the pandemic.

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)
Amazon | Apple Books | Bookshop

Phantom Islands
by Dirk Liesemer
translated by Peter Lewis
Haus, Oct 2019
Amazon | Apple Books | Bookshop

The Un-Discovered Islands
by Malachy Tallack
Birlinn, Oct 2016 (U.K. edition)
Picador, Nov 2017 (U.S. edition)
Amazon | Apple Books | Bookshop

To suggest a book for this list, please contact me. If you are a publisher, author or publicist of one of these books and would like to send me a review copy, see the reviewing guidelines.

Note that as a member of the Amazon Associates Program and the Bookshop and iTunes affiliate programs, I earn income from qualifying purchases made via these links.

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
Amazon | Apple Books | Bookshop

The first three volumes of the History of Cartography Project will be published in Chinese next year, “completing a translation project that began in 2014,” the Project announced on Facebook last week.

The Project was one subject of an international seminar on the history of cartography held at Yunnan University last month. Project director Matthew Edney gave the opening remarks, the text of which is here.

Meanwhile, Volume Four is in galleys and is now scheduled for publication in January 2020, and work continues on Volume Five. Volume Six, covering the 20th century, came out in 2015.

(Remember that the first three volumes, plus Volume Six, are available as free downloads.)

(Incidentally, Seegel is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe: a review of that is forthcoming as well. Brotton has several books to his name: he’s co-author of this year’s Talking Maps, and in 2012 published A History of the World in 12 Maps, which I reviewed here.)

Related: Map Books of 2019.

To suggest a book for this list, please contact me. If you are a publisher, author or publicist of one of these books and would like to send me a review copy, see the reviewing guidelines.

Note that as an Amazon Associate and iTunes affiliate program member, I earn income from qualifying purchases made via these links.

January

• Celestial Atlas: A Journey in the Sky Through Maps by Elena Percivaldi (White Star) Amazon

February

• World War II Illustrated Atlas by David Jordan and Andrew Wiest (Amber) Amazon
• The Times Desktop Atlas of the World, 5th edition (Times Books) Amazon

March

• Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture edited by Ingrid Baumgärtner, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby and Katrin Kogman-Appel (De Gruyter) Amazon

April

• The Atlas of Classic Tales by Claudia Bordin (White Star) Amazon
• Cartography: The Ideal and Its History by Matthew H. Edney (University of Chicago Press)  Amazon Apple Books
• City Atlas by Federica Magrin and Giulia Lombardo (White Star) Amazon
• Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M. R. O’Connor (St. Martin’s Press) Amazon
• The World Seen from Asia by Pierre Singaravelou and Fabrice Argounes (Asia Ink) Amazon

May

• Working with Map Projections: A Guide to their Selection by Fritz Kessler and Sarah Battersby (CRC Press) Amazon

June

• De Geschiedeneis van Nederland in 100 Oude Kaarten by Marieke van Delft and Reinder Storm (Lannoo) Amazon
• The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty by Hongping Annie Nie (Bodleian) Amazon
• British and American News Maps in the Early Cold War Period, 1945–1955 by Jeffrey P. Stone (Palgrave Macmillan) Amazon
• The Times Universal Atlas of the World, 4th edition (Times Books) Amazon

July

• Why North is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From by Mick Ashworth (Bodleian) Amazon
• Fifty Maps and the Stories They Tell by Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea (Bodleian) Amazon
• Talking Maps by Jerry Brotton and Nick Millea (Bodleian) Amazon
• Trail of Footprints: A History of Indigenous Maps from Viceregal Mexico by Alex Hidalgo (University of Texas Press) Amazon

August

• Great Explorers’ Atlas by Riccardo Francaviglia and Margherita Sgarlata (White Star) Amazon
• Connections and Content: Reflections on Networks and the History of Cartography by Mark Monmonier (Esri) Amazon
• Manhattan: Mapping the Story of an Island by Jennifer Thermes (Abrams) Amazon

September

• How to Draw a Map by Malcom and Alexander Swanston (HarperCollins) Amazon
• World War II Map by Map (DK) Amazon

October

• The Sky Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching (Simon & Schuster UK) Amazon
• How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information by Alberto Cairo (W. W. Norton) Amazon
• The World Atlas of Wine, 8th Edition by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson (Mitchell Beazley) Amazon
• Phantom Islands: In Search of Mythical Lands by Dirk Liesemer; translated by Peter Lewis (Haus) Amazon

• We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa by Chris McDowall and Tim Denee (Massey University Press) Amazon
• Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps by Mary S. Morgan and Iain Sinclair (Thames & Hudson) Amazon
• National Geographic Atlas of the World, 11th Edition (National Geographic) Amazon
• Oxford Atlas of the World, 26th Edition (Oxford University Press) Amazon

• The Atlas of Unusual Borders by Zoran Nikolic (Collins) Amazon
• Airline Maps: A Century of Art and Design by Mark Ovenden and Maxwell Roberts (Particular Books/Penguin) Amazon
• The A-Z History of London by Philip Parker (Collins) Amazon
• The Atlas of Boston History edited by Nancy S. Seasholes (University of Chicago Press) Amazon
• The Map Tour: A History of Tourism Told through Rare Maps by Hugh Thomson (André Deutsch) Amazon

November

• Islamic Maps by Yossef Rapoport (Bodleian) Amazon

December

• Mapping Beyond Measure: Art, Cartography, and the Space of Global Modernity by Simon Ferdinand (University of Nebraska Press) Amazon
• Trim, the Cartographer’s Cat by Matthew Flinders, Gillian Dooley and Philippa Sandall (Adlard Coles) Amazon

Scheduled in 2020

• The Sky Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching, U.S. edition (Chronicle, February) Amazon
• Mapping the Great Game: Explorers, Spies and Maps in 19th Century Central Asia, India and Tibet by Riaz Dean (Casemate, January) Amazon
• The History of Cartography, Vol. 4: Cartography in the European Enlightenment edited by Matthew H. Edney and Mary Sponberg Pedley (University of Chicago Press, January) Amazon
• The Atlas of Women Explorers by Riaz Dean (White Star, May) Amazon
• Underground Cities by Mark Ovenden (White Lion, September) Amazon
• A History of Britain in 12 Maps by Philip Parker (Michael Joseph, June) Amazon Apple Books

“The Limits to Mapping,” a talk Matthew Edney gave at Yale University last week as part of the Franke Program series of lectures, is now available on YouTube.

Edney, who’s Osher Professor in the History of Cartography at the University of Southern Maine and the director of the History of Cartography Project (his name’s come up before), also has a new book coming out next year: Cartography: The Ideal and Its History (University of Chicago Press) is apparently an argument about how problematic cartography as an all-encompassing concept is, which ought to make for an interesting read.