The Map Room

Via MapHist comes word of the publication of the second, revised edition of Marcel van den Broecke’s Ortelius Atlas Maps: An Illustrated Guide. “This very practical and informative manual gives an extensive overview and a description of all the maps that appeared in the famous first atlas by Abraham Ortelius, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570 and all later editions.”

Rare Book Feast, a video series “celebrating the timeless beauty of books in the age of digital ephemera” (as Maria Popova puts it), opens with a look at the privately printed World Geo-Graphic Atlas (1953), now a collector’s item.

Paul Di Filippo reviews Tom Koch’s Disease Maps in the Barnes and Noble Review. “What cannot be overlooked about this book is something incidental but overwhelming: the visual beauty of these maps. Colored and drawn by hand in most cases, with exquisite calligraphy, they offer aesthetic joys divorced from their mortal reality. Seldom has mass death looked so graphically alluring.”

Previously: Disease Maps.

• Buy Disease Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

I’ve been hearing about PostGIS in Action for a couple of years now, so I’m surprised that it only came out (in print form, at least) last month. Richard Marsden reviews it on Geoweb Guru: “This is the first book to be published that covers PostGIS in depth, and as such should be a welcome addition to most open source geospatial bookshelves.”

Previously: PostGIS in Action Reviewed.

• Buy PostGIS in Action at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

If the 18½×24-inch, $4,000, limited-edition Earth atlas wasn’t exclusive or enormous enough for you, how about the six-foot-by-four-and-a-half-foot, 264-pound, $100,000, 31-copy platinum edition? Klencke’s got some competition, I see. Coverage in the spring 2011 issue of ArcNews.

Previously: World’s Largest World Atlas; Atlas Updates.

Martin Dodge writes to let us know about The Map Reader: Theories of Mapping Practice and Cartographic Representation, a collection of essays he co-edited with Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. “The volume excerpts over 50 key pieces of scholarly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

We knew that Jeopardy force of nature Ken Jennings was working on a book about maps; now we know that the book, entitled Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, will be coming in September. Publishers Weekly has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden reports that his new book, Railway Maps of the World, is now available; there’s an interview with him about the book on National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog. Previously: Railway Maps of the World. Update, May 7: A…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist comes word of Early American Cartographies, a collection edited by Martin Brückner; its 14 essays will “examine indigenous and European peoples’ creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited.” Available in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Reif Larsen’s 2009 novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, about a precocious 12-year-old cartographer, is now available as an iPad app (iTunes link). Unfortunately not available in Canada, so I can’t say more than that. Via @HodderGeography….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden announced on Twitter today that his next book, Railway Maps of the World, will be available soon. (According to Amazon and the publisher’s website, next month.) I’ve known about this for a couple of months now and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John Krygier reports that the second edition of Making Maps, the manual of map design he co-authored with Denis Wood, is now shipping. My review of the first edition. Previously: Second Edition of Making Maps Coming Next Year. Buy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Independent has a review of a book that might be of interest: Venetian Navigators by Andrea di Robilant, “an account of 14th-century map-mania and the Italian navigators who charted apparently new-found lands in the North Atlantic.” Emphasis on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that there are two OpenStreetMap manuals out there — the one by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton, the other by Jonathan Bennett — each of which, confusingly, is titled OpenStreetMap. Muki…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While I continue to procrastinate my own review of the book, here’s another review, by Dan Karran, of OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. Dan calls it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

British Map Engravers by Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams. “An illustrated dictionary of well over 1,500 members of the map-trade in the British Isles from the beginnings until the mid nineteenth century, including all the known engravers and lithographers, all…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Listen to an interview with Rebecca Solnit about her book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, from 99% Invisible, a program on public radio station KALW. (Yes, my review is still coming.) Previously: LA Times Reviews Infinite City; Infinite City:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bookslut’s Christopher Merkel reviews the English translation of Belén Gopegui’s 1993 prize-winning debut novel, The Scale of Maps (La escala de los mapas), in which a geographer and a mapmaker conduct an affair. [A]side from its focus on the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist comes word of a forthcoming book by Tom Koch, due out in June: Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. From the publisher’s website: Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via @nyplmaps, I discover that Los Angeles in Maps by Glen Creason was published last October. The Irish Times has a review of If Maps Could Speak, a memoir by the former director of the Irish Ordnance Survey, Richard…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oliver O’Brien reviews OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. “The book succeeds in simultaneously being OpenStreetMap for Dummies, OpenStreetMap: The Missing Manual and the O’Reilly OpenStreetMap book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Mapping of California as an Island: An Illustrated Checklist, by Glen McLaughlin with Nancy Mayo, is a cartobibliography that catalogues all known maps that depicted California as an island — 249 in all, along with title pages, frontispieces,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Los Angeles Times has a review of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. “Infinite City” examines that San Francisco, a physically compact place that contains multitudes, through a series of elegantly rendered maps and cleverly researched…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John P. Snyder’s Map Projections: A Working Manual (1987) is available online as a PDF from the U.S. Geological Survey. Also via MapHist….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist, news of a new book coming in April from the University of Chicago Press: Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, who “bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Brain Pickings’s 7 Must-Read Books on Maps is heavy on the art side of the map book world, and includes some very familiar titles. Via @cartografie….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For the second year running, I’ve compiled a list of The Map Room’s top ten eleven best-selling map books. This list is based on Amazon orders made through this website that were tracked by my Amazon Associates account. Dark and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands is generating a lot of buzz — if nothing else, reviews keep turning up in my Google alerts. Subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will, the short book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m only now finding out about Texas: A Historical Atlas, thanks to this profile of the book’s author, retired history professor A. Ray Stephens, in the Denton Record-Chronicle. The atlas follows up on the Historical Atlas of Texas, published…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is interesting: a second edition of John Krygier’s guide to map design, Making Maps, is coming out in February or March of next year. I reviewed the first edition way back in March 2006. John Krygier says that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another review of the English edition of the OpenStreetMap manual by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton — OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World — by Directions Magazine’s Adena Schutzberg. Previously: Two Book Reviews….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rachel Hewitt’s history of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation, is reviewed in The Independent. Meanwhile, the MapQuest developer blog takes a look at Ramm, Topf and Chilton’s OpenStreetMap. Previously: Map of a Nation: Hewitt’s History of the Ordnance…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh look: two blogs about mapping other bodies in the solar system by planetary scientist Paul Schenk: Dr. Schenk’s 3D House of Satellites, about stereo, perspective and topographic maps of moons and dwarf planets (thanks to recent Cassini data,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

San Francisco Public Press covers the launch of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit. “The collection of fanciful maps of the city combines disparate but creatively juxtaposed items such as World War II shipyards and African-American…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Once again, to help with your gift shopping, I’ve compiled a list of noteworthy books about maps that were published in 2010. There are 10 books on the list this year: they include new atlases, web mapping manuals, a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On GIS Lounge, Caitlin has a review of Jonathan Bennett’s OpenStreetMap: Be Your Own Cartographer, which she calls “an excellent reference volume for anyone wanting to become involved with this wiki-style geographic data collection project.” Previously: Another OpenStreetMap Book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A fourth collection of maps has been published by Black Dog: Mapping America: Exploring the Continent by Fritz Kessler. (The previous volumes are 2007’s Mapping London and 2008’s Mapping England, both by Simon Foxell, and Mapping New York, edited…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two more GIS books to mention: Web GIS: Principles and Applications by Pinde Fu and Jiulin Sun, from Esri Press (via Esri Mapping Center); and Spatial Analysis and Modeling in Geographical Transformation Process, edited by Y. Murayama and Rajesh Bahadur…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A brief review of Rachel Hewitt’s history of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation (previously) from the Financial Times. Via All Points Blog. Making Maps reports that Denis Wood’s Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (previously) is now…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Matt Rosenberg reviews the new ninth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World (previously). Matt likes and recommends it: “This new edition is absolutely gorgeous, from the clear, color-coded index in the front to the legible-sized font…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The ninth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World is now available; the official publication date was yesterday. The press release outlines some of the changes from the eighth edition, which came out in 2005: Eleven of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rachel Hewitt’s history of the Ordnance Survey, Map of a Nation, is now available (at least in the UK; here’s the Amazon.ca listing, but it’s not yet listed on Amazon.com). Not coincidentally, Hewitt has an article about the OS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Adena Schutzberg reviews Muki Huklay’s Interacting with Geospatial Technologies. Despite quibbles about the graphics and the copyediting, Adena says, “This is a solid book that pulls together the research in what hopefully will be a growing area of study…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh look: another forthcoming book about OpenStreetMap. Like the other one, it’s also called OpenStreetMap, which won’t be confusing at all, but the subtitle this time is Be Your Own Cartographer. It’s by Jonathan Bennett and it’s apparently scheduled…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This Reuters article on hand-drawn maps is already turning up in a number of newspapers and other media outlets. Broad in scope, it touches on two things of interest. First, the publication of the book of collected maps from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

OpenGeoData reports that Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton’s OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World, a book that was first published in German (of course) in 2008 and has since gone through three (German)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bookslut’s Colleen Mondor reviews three map-related books for her September column: Michael Trinklein’s Lost States (reviewed here in July 2008); The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories by Val Ross, a young-adult look at mapmakers from Mercator to Pearsall;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Making Maps blog has an excerpt of Denis Wood’s new book, Rethinking the Power of Maps (previously). In Chapter 1, available as a PDF file, Wood argues provocatively that there were no maps before 1500 — making a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The National Geographic Store is having a limited-time sale on the deluxe hardcover eighth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World. Normally $150, it’s now only $60 — at least until midnight tonight. The reason for this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Monmonier’s latest, No Dig, No Fly, No Go, is reviewed on the H-HistGeog mailing list by Richard Harris. “Had this book arrived without its cover, the author would have remained obvious. This is a Mark Monmonier text through…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kuntspedia has put online an electronic version of My Head Is a Map, a 1973 festschrift honouring map dealer R. V. Tooley, with essays on the history of map-making and map collecting. It’s also available for download as an e-book,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

ESRI Press is reprinting Arthur Robinson’s first book, The Look of Maps (1952), which was based on his doctoral research. (Robinson, you may recall, went on to co-author a widely used textbook, Elements of Cartography, create his own map projection,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Collins Maps blog announces the forthcoming release of The Times Atlas of Britain, which, they say, “includes fully up-to-date reference maps, statistics, geographical information, images and historical mapping to give an exceptionally detailed view of every county in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Vector One reviews Lining Up Data in ArcGIS by Margaret M. Maher: “This book is very helpful. It explains how to identify geographic coordinate systems as compared to projected coordinate systems. If you are using ArcMap, then this book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Collins Maps blog reports the publication of the Helsinki Commission’s Atlas of the Baltic Sea (for which Collins produced the major maps). From the Commission’s press release: Collected in a single publication, here is a wealth of interesting…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Astronomy blog makes mention of The Great Atlas of the Sky, “the world’s largest printed atlas of the entire sky,” by Polish astronomer Piotr Brych. “The 296 foldout maps, each measuring 17 inches by 24 inches, depict the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard Marsden reviews The World of Gerard Mercator by Andrew Taylor: “Taylor does a good job of putting him into both a historic and a cartographic context, and does his best to explain Mercator with the relatively limited information…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist, news that a followup to Denis Wood’s 1992 book, The Power of Maps, is being published this month. Rethinking the Power of Maps, written by Wood along with John Fels and John Krygier, “takes a fresh look…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist, news of Mark Monmonier’s latest book, coming out this month: No Dig, No Fly, No Go: How Maps Restrict and Control. Some maps help us find our way; others restrict where we go and what we do….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bill Dollins reviews PostGIS in Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu (see previous entry). “This book addresses a problem I have run into repeatedly in my consulting work: educating database professionals (DBAs, developers, etc.) on working with spatial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia reports that the book of hand-drawn maps collected by the Hand Drawn Map Association (see previous entry) is coming out this fall: Princeton Architectural Press is publishing From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn…  •  Continue reading this entry.

JonesCat Publishing, the company publishing The Hills Are Stuffed with Swedish Girls, a comic novel with a cover parodying the Ordnance Survey’s Landranger map series, is throwing in the towel and going out of business, Grough reports; the company…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mike Parker has an essay in the Telegraph that refers to the two upcoming BBC TV series and British Library exhibition; Parker’s Map Addict, which I reviewed last October, is now available in paperback. As for those two BBC series,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Globe and Mail on a new book co-published by Ecotrust Canada and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, Living Proof: The Essential Data Colection Guide for Indigenous Use-and-Occupancy Map Surveys by Terry N. Tobias: “The book, seven years…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping Forestry, Peter Eredics’s book on GIS for the forestry industry, is reviewed in The Forestry Source, the Society of American Foresters’s newsletter. Via ESRI. Michael Trinklein’s Lost States, which I reviewed in July 2008 when it was a print-on-demand…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Steven Heller’s roundup of map books in the book review section of tomorrow’s New York Times includes some familiar titles, such as Mark Ovenden’s Paris Underground (which I reviewed last November), Frank Jacobs’s Strange Maps, and The Map as Art…  •  Continue reading this entry.

1. Author Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet) is speaking at Montana State University on March 8. Larsen will explore the narrative power of both cartography and literature, providing a behind-the-scenes peek into the creation of “The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

PopMatters has a long review of Toby Lester’s Fourth Part of the World (which I reviewed last December). Update: And here’s another review in the Providence Journal (via Map the Universe). Buy The Fourth Part of the World at Amazon.com…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Ordnance Survey’s lawyers are going after the publishers of a comic novel, The Hills Are Stuffed with Swedish Girls, whose cover parodies the OS’s Landranger series, Grough reports: “In place of the OS’s initialled north arrow are the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The David Rumsey Map Collection announces the online availability of The California Water Atlas, “a monument of 20th century cartographic publishing.” When the atlas came out in 1979, it got rave reviews from both historians and scientists. Charles Wollenberg,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Grough reports that the Ordnance Survey has made two previously published official histories of the organization available online: A History of the Ordnance Survey, published in 1980, and Ordnance Survey: Mapmakers to Britain Since 1791, published in 1992. Previously: The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Toby Lester, author of The Fourth Part of the World, the very fine book about the Waldseemüller Map that I reviewed last month, is speaking this Sunday at the Hingham Public Library in Hingham, Massachusetts, just southeast of Boston….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovenden notes (with obvious delight) that his book about the Paris Metro, Paris Underground (which I reviewed in November 2009), got a glowing mention on the New Yorker website (much like Strange Maps did in October). Previously: Review:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here are The Map Room’s top 10 bestselling map books in 2009, based on Amazon orders made through this website that were tracked by my Amazon Associates account. Of course this list is heavily influenced by the amount of attention…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rutgers University cartographer Mike Siegel (he prefers “mapmaker”) gets a profile in the Star-Ledger’s online “I Am NJ” series. Siegel creates maps for two dozen scholarly books each year, but he also produced the maps for a new atlas that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Electoral Map reviews Mapping New York, a new book that looks at the cartographic history of New York City: “I expected a glossy table book, but what I got was a richly illustrated history of New York City…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re thinking about giving someone a map-related gift this season, I’ve put together a list of nine books about maps that have gotten a certain amount of attention over the past year. I’ve deliberately picked books whose appeal extends…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via webmapper, news that Dutch designer Jost Grootens has won the 2009 Rotterdam Design Prize for the design of four books: The Big KAN Atlas, the Limes Atlas, the Metropolitan World Atlas, and the Vinex Atlas. Alice Rawsthorn, who…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two more brief book items. Slate has a slideshow by Frank Jacobs excerpting material from his book and blog, Strange Maps, starting with Çatalhüyük and ending with a geological map of the Moon. And Katharine Harmon continues to get…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Henry Walling’s five-foot-square “Map of the Counties of Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket, Massachusetts,” produced in 1858, is now available as a hardcover book, the Cape Cod Times reports: “The new book’s maps were shot digitally by Truro photographer Charles…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m about halfway through Toby Lester’s Fourth Part of the World and hope to have a review for you soon. In the meantime, check out this brief review in the New York Times’s travel section that covers both Lester’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Daily Telegraph reviews The Fourth Part of the World, the new book on the Waldseemüller map by Toby Lester: “Just telling the story of the invention of the name, the creation of the map, its disappearance, and its…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More media coverage of Strange Maps, the book version of what is basically the most popular map blog out there: the Freakonomics blog interviews the book’s (and blog’s) author, Frank Jacobs. Previously: Updates on Two New Books; Strange Maps,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Grim Reaper’s Road Map: An Atlas of Mortality in Britain, which came out last year, “analyses over 14 million deaths over the 24-year period 1981-2004 in Britain. It gives a comprehensive overview of the geographical pattern of mortality,”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jeff Thurston reviews Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, a collection of essays: In summary, this book cuts a wide swath. It is not solely for cartographers or map makers. Rather, it is about the processes that motivate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Remember Children Map the World, the collection of maps from the biennial Barbara Petchenik Children’s Maps Competition? I blogged about it four years ago. Now there’s a second volume; whereas the first volume covered the first 10 years of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

While browsing in, of all places, a science fiction bookstore, I stumbled across a new book by Mark Ovenden that looked quite interesting in the brief time I had to look at it: Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The National Post takes a look at Katharine Harmon’s new book, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, which I briefly mentioned back in August. Via AnyGeo. Meanwhile, a related exhibition curated by Harmon along with Christopher Henry,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two items on two books that are just coming out right now: Good magazine has a brief item on the book version of Frank Jacobs’s Strange Maps, and the Washington Post reviews Toby Lester’s book on the Waldseemüller map,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I had thought that all the books about Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world — you know, the one that first named “America” — would have come and gone with the 2007 quincentennial of the map, but I’d…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On H-HistGeog, Sally Hermansen reviews Mark Monmonier’s Coast Lines: How Mapmakers Frame the World and Chart Environmental Change, which explores the cartographic difficulties in mapping shorelines, which change over time. “Coast Lines is no exception to what we have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First announced more than a year ago, the book version of Strange Maps, based on the map blog that is far more popular than mine, is set to be published later this month, and it gets a writeup in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of interviews with Colin Ellard as he promotes his book, You Are Here (Where Am I? in Canada): one at Scientific American’s Mind Matters (via Matt), and one on WHYY’s Radio Times (search for the August 10,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reviews Colin Ellard’s book on how people (and animals) navigate, You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall (in Canada, it has been published as Where…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MAPS-L, news of a new book of essays on cartography: Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. “This book,” says the publisher, presents a diverse set of approaches to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Liberate the Mind has an excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Life Inc., a history of corporatism, which has the following relevant passage (which opens by declaring that Prince Henry the Navigator was no navigator). Royals went map crazy. Cartography…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Collins Map Blog mentions the British Cartographic Society Awards, in no small part because Collins Geo picked up a couple of them. To view current and past winners, select each award from the BCS’s page; there does not appear…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More reviews of books previously mentioned here: Directions reviews GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design (see previous entry). The New York Times reviews The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, a copy of which I now have and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design, which, he notes, is written independent of any particular software package. “Gretchen’s book is something that you can use almost anywhere with any medium and won’t…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Four Courts Press announces the publication of J. H. Andrews’s Maps in Those Days: Cartographic Methods Before 1850, which addresses the question of “what early cartographers actually did. … It deals with non-thematic maps of all kinds and of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Alerts are funny sometimes. A short item in the Tumbler Ridge News — Tumbler Ridge is a remote small town in northeastern British Columbia — about how a local writer contributed to a backroad atlas that won a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An interesting post on the Collins Maps blog that deals with the following question: when preparing a map or atlas, do you use local names (e.g., Moskva, München, Torino) or the translated names used in the language of your map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Booklist reviews the 12th edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World — “a recommended source for any library or individual who can afford it.” Via Collins Maps. Glenn points to the upcoming Manual of Geographic Information Systems,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: Mike Parker’s Map Addict (see previous entry) is reviewed on the Collins Maps blog. GIS Pathway reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. James Fee notes the upcoming publication of PostGIS in Action…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More coverage and reviews of Reif Larsen’s breakout novel about a precocious 12-year-old cartographer, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet: The Age and the Boston Globe cover the author and the phenomenon as much as the book itself;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First-time novelists don’t usually get profiled in Vanity Fair, but Reif Larsen’s first novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, has been generating that kind of advance buzz for the 29-year-old writer. (I hate him already.) It’s a book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mike Parker’s new book, Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge and the Ordnance Survey, is out today; from the Daily Mail’s account of it, it sounds like eccentric good fun: “Mike Parker — who spent his teenage years…  •  Continue reading this entry.

University of Waterloo psychologist Colin Ellard’s new book, Where Am I? Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon but Get Lost in the Mall, was released in Canada this month. Last Friday’s Globe and Mail had an…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Randy Plemel, who we last saw working on accessible transit maps, writes to let us know about the latest episode of his Smogr Alert podcast, in which he interviews Charles Graves, the author of The Genealogy of Cities (see…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Submissions are now open for the second volume of the Cartography Design Annual, Nick Springer’s compilation of “maps from some of the top cartographers in the world.” I reviewed the first volume last September. Previously: Review: Cartography Design Annual…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Charles Graves writes to tell us about his upcoming book, The Genealogy of Cities, “a compilation of ancient and modern city plans, from 350 BCE to the present, depicting both built and proposed plans. … [I]t is illustrated with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Times Higher Education reviews The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, a collection of essays from the October 2004 iteration of the Nebenzahl Lectures in the History of Cartography edited by James Akerman. “Between them, they have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The need for accurate and up-to-date maps during a natural disaster or other humanitarian crisis is obvious. Teaching humanitarian aid workers how to make use of maps and mapping software is the idea behind the Field Guide to Humanitarian…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: Geoweb Guru reviews Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers; on Vector One, Jeff shares his notes on three recent books from ESRI Press (Building a GIS by Dave Peters, the second edition of Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rachel Hewitt has written a history of the Ordnance Survey; even though Map of a Nation won’t be published until next year, it’s already won a £10,000 prize from the Royal Society of Literature. I’ll be looking for this book…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Publishers Marketplace is reporting that Jeopardy freak of nature Ken Jennings has sold a book “exploring the world of map nuts and geography obsessives” called Maphead to Scribner (Google cache; LA Observed). No idea when it’ll be out; the publishing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A review on astronomy enthusiast site Cloudy Nights of the new Cambridge Double Star Atlas, which, unlike the Cambridge Star Atlas itself (reviewed last month), is coil-bound rather than hardcover. The reviewer, a double star observer, compares its usefulness…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The ESRI Mapping Center blog points to a new booklet from the British Cartographic Society: Cartography: An Introduction, co-written by Giles Darkes and Mary Spence, is part of the BCS’s Better Mapping Campaign (see previous entry); its aim “is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eric Pimpler of the GeoChalkboard blog (which I was not aware of prior to this) has posted the the fifth revision of Mashup Mania with Google Maps, a free 52-page e-book on the Google Maps API; direct link to the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS for Dummies is now out (see previous entry); Leszek has some information about the author, Michael DeMers, an associate professor of geography at NMSU and the author of several other books on GIS, including the textbook Fundamentals of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

ESRI Press has just published the sixth edition of Map Use: Reading and Analysis, which it acquired from its previous publisher. From the press release: “Replete with nearly 500 maps, photographs, tables, and charts to illustrate the text, this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been meaning to do a review of the star atlases and books about star charts I have in my possession. Until I get around to doing that, please read this post by Rod Mollise — “Uncle Rod” — which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Crime novelist Linda Fairstein’s latest book, Lethal Legacy, has a distressingly familiar plotline. From, believe it or not, The Courier Mail of Brisbane, Australia: “[Series protagonist Alex] Cooper and regular police associate Mike Chapman delve into the shady world…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Hand Drawn Map Association is (a) in conjunction with Princeton Architectural Press, publishing a collection of hand-drawn maps, and (b) is running a contest, in part to solicit submissions for said book. The contest runs until the end…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: GeoWeb Guru has a review of Geography Mark-Up Language: Foundation for the Geo-Web by Ron Lake et al. (via Slashgeo); Google Earth Blog reviews Josie Wernecke’s KML Handbook (previously); Vector One reports on the first A-level GIS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John Krygier has nice things to say about The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, by his colleague, Denis Wood (Krygier and Wood co-authored Making Maps) and John Fels, and reprints the blurb he wrote for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Christian Science Monitor looks at four “offbeat” atlases, all published in 2008: two rather pricey atlases of architecture; The Art Atlas, which “explores how inspiring new art forms have traveled, from the cave drawings of ancient Europe and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An article in today’s Washington Post looks at the mystery about where the information found in Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map — the first one to label the New World as “America” — came from, and interviews John Hessler, author…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A curious review of Simon Foxell’s Mapping England in the Times earlier this week; it took about half the piece to actually come around to the book: It’s not the world’s best-edited book — there are factual slips and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Google Geo Developers Blog announces the publication of The KML Handbook, written by the tech writer who wrote the KML 2.1 and 2.2 documentation, Josie Wernecke. Quoth the announcement: “It explains all the various elements and features of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Worldmapper team’s Atlas of the Real World continues to get lots of media coverage; the latest is from CNN. The Atlas “has redrawn the map giving vivid new insights and bringing economic, social and environmental data to life,”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A debate on the question of what GIS can offer world history, based on this article by J. B. Owens (PDF), triggered a lengthy discussion on MapHist earlier this month. Unfortunately, the MapHist discussion was sidetracked by a throwaway comment…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Keene provides “some simple guidelines” on how to choose an atlas; since he’s the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World — the 15th edition of which has come out before I had the chance to review…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve heard good things about the Times Comprehensive Atlas, the 12th edition of which came out in the U.K. last year; it’s being published in its U.S. version on Tuesday, according to the Amazon page. David Mumford of HarperCollins…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More coverage of some atlases we’ve already seen: BBC Radio 4’s Today looks at the Worldmapper team’s Atlas of the Real World, a collection of newsworthy cartograms (see previous entry). CNN covers Earth, the 30-kilogram, limited edition, hella-expensive and gigantic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s not on their website (unless I’ve missed it); I have to find out from this item in a newspaper from the United Arab Emirates (!) that the cartograms from the fantastic Worldmapper team are soon going to be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Harm de Blij’s new book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, which examines the differences between those who are globally mobile and those who are bound to their home terrain, is reviewed by About.com’s Matt…  •  Continue reading this entry.

David Lanegran’s Minnesota on the Map: A Historical Atlas “brings together for the first time stunning but rarely seen maps of Minnesota through five centuries”; the Rochester, Minnesota Post-Bulletin has more: “The maps include early city plans of Rochester,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A reader wrote me in June: I was just wondering if you have read the new book (due out this month, June 2008) called 1434 by Gavin Menzies in which he puts forward a hypthesis that the Chinese set off…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, a review of George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, a 1945 work on place names in the United States. Bill Kauffman’s review “a learned…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nick Springer writes, “I have just published the Cartography Design Annual #1, a compilation of some of the best designed maps from 2007.” It looks interesting: the volume seems to be based on submissions from the CartoTalk community, which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James is looking forward to two upcoming books on GIS from ESRI Press: Building a GIS (Amazon) and The Business Benefits of GIS: An ROI Approach (Amazon, web site)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Off camping for a few days; here are a few links to tide you over: Roger Hart’s very good blog, GeoCarta, has moved to a new address and a new platform. The Sandusky Library Archives Research Center’s map collection is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Publishers Weekly article on the impact of online references like Wikipedia on reference publishing — multi-volume encyclopedias are essentially toast — has the following passage about maps and atlases: Encyclopedias aren’t the only place publishers are feeling pain, though….  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s scheduled for completion in 2010, but already the Atlas of Yellowstone, tantalizing bits of which that have already been completed are already available for preview, looks more than promising. It goes beyond maps of just the park, although…  •  Continue reading this entry.

WorldChanging has a review of An Atlas of Radical Cartography — and it’s by Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art. “An Atlas is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking and original publications i’ve read in a long long…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia has a brief review of Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, Vincent Virga’s book featuring maps from the Library of Congress. Vector One reviews John Blake’s Charts of War: The Maps and Charts That Have Informed and Illustrated War at Sea. Buy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The ginormous Earth atlas is: 61×46.9 cm (24×18½ inches) 576 pages limited to a print run of 2,000 sold with its own metal stand $4,000 (And hopefully not a premature April Fool’s joke.) Via MAPS-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

We’ve seen books come out that were based on the map holdings of the Library of Congress, Library and Archives Canada, and the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; now it’s the turn of the National Library of Australia. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

When last we heard about Chris Jesty’s revision of Alfred Wainwright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, nearly three years ago, volume one (of seven) was just about to be published. Now five volumes have been published, the Cumberland News…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The ESRI Mapping Center blog reports on a new book from ESRI Press: Designed Maps: A Sourcebook for GIS Users. It’s by Cynthia Brewer, who also wrote Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (see previous entry). The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartophilia has a review of Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World — well, it’s not so much a review as an excuse to share images of transit maps, but I certainly don’t mind. I’ll be ordering my own…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The South African Mail and Guardian reviews a collection of essays edited by Norman Etherington, Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa: “By probing the ‘secret histories’ encoded in maps, which continue to influence the political, legal, social and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First came the BibliOdyssey book, a dead-tree compilation based on our friend PK’s excellent blog about archival images (some of which are maps, so I have no qualms about mentioning either blog or book; here’s the Amazon link for the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The huge Historical Atlas of Canada was published in three volumes between 1987 and 1993. An online version, the Historical Atlas of Canada Online Learning Project, is now being developed by the University of Toronto’s geography department. It would…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Census Atlas of the United States “is a large-format publication about 300 pages long and containing almost 800 maps. Data from decennial censuses prior to 2000 support nearly 150 maps and figures, providing context and an historical perspective…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The 14th-century Gough Map, the oldest surviving map of Great Britain, is getting renewed attention with the publication of Nick Millea’s study, which, Tony Campbell says, “is the first study for fifty years of this highly important map.” To…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John Bartholomew — who, along with his two brothers, was “the last generation of the Edinburgh cartographic family to run the business of John Bartholomew & Son Ltd.” — has died aged 85, the Edinburgh Evening News reports. The Edinburgh-based…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Wall Street Journal reviews two exhibits from Chicago’s Festival of Maps: the flagship Field Museum exhibit (of course), along with one of two exhibits at the Newberry Library, Ptolemy’s Geography and Renaissance Mapmakers. (Actually, the Newberry claims three exhibits,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The editors of An Atlas of Radical Cartography wrote in to promote their book. “An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An unusual book forthcoming from Hes & de Graaf: Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons: The Art of the Decorative Cartographic Title-Page. “Over the time period covered by the present publication — roughly from the 1470s to the 1870s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last week, the National Post website ran a three-part excerpt of Graham Robb’s new book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. Of interest to us is the second part, an amusing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“The University of Chicago Press has a special web feature to celebrate the publication of Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, the book that accompanies the exhibit currently at the Field Museum in Chicago,” writes Dean Blobaum. “The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last week, the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec announced the English-language publication of a book that highlights the cartographic collections of that institution. Mapping a Continent: Historical Atlas of North America, 1492-1814, coauthored by BANQ map librarian Jean-François…  •  Continue reading this entry.

When I was a child, my first exposure to the wider world was through the National Geographic Picture Atlas of Our World, which, in the classic National Geographic style that eschewed overt criticism of foreign countries, simple maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Ovendon’s Transit Maps of the World sounds delightful: it’s a compendium of maps of urban rail systems of more than 200 cities around the world. Cory Doctorow is smitten: “This is sheer public transit/map porn, and I’m in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Times has an article on the new — 12th — edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which was released yesterday. The article discusses the changes that had to be made since the previous edition, especially those…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On MapHist, John Hessler writes: Two new books on Waldseemüller and the context of the creation of the 1507 and 1516 world maps are due to be released in the next few months. The first, by Seymour Schwartz (an…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Next month, ESRI Press is reprinting Eduard Imhof’s classic Cartographic Relief Presentation, which was first published as Kartographische Geländedarstellung in 1965 and translated into English in 1982; it’s been out of print since then. Press release: GISuser.com, Directions. Update,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geospatial Web: How Geobrowsers, Social Software and the Web 2.0 are Shaping the Network Society is a collection of essays about new geospatial technology — Google Earth, georeferenced feeds, the usual stuff we’ve been talking about — and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

British map dealer Philip Burden — his company is Clive A. Burden Ltd., named for his late father — is in the U.S. on a book tour; the second volume of his massive (and expensive!) bibliographic reference, The Mapping of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been spending some time reading through Matthew Edney’s annotated bibliography of scholarly literature on the history of cartography; a new revision went online at the Coordinates web site last week. The list is bigger than some of my comprehensive…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Next Thursday evening at the Scandinavia House in New York City, a talk by map collector William B. Ginsberg about his new book on the area of his expertise, a cartobibliography titled Printed Maps of Scandinavia and the Arctic,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Webmapper notes the availability of the first book about the Yahoo mapping APIs, Yahoo! Maps Mashups. “It was about time, especially as the Google Maps API is covered in quite a few books already,” writes Edward. The book’s author,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Much book-related news has been accumulating over here; past time I shared it. Surveying, Mapping and GIS reviews Dava Sobel’s Longitude, a book about John Harrison, who discovered how to determine longitude. I think I need to read this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

High Earth Orbit’s Andrew Turner has written Introduction to Neogeography, a short e-book, published as part of O’Reilly’s “Short Cuts” series and available as a PDF file for $8. It’s a guide to the new mapping technologies that are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Atlases, believe it or not, are hot this year,” says the CBC’s Shaun Smith in a review of four thematic atlases published in Canada this year: The Canadian Hockey Atlas; The Wine Atlas of Canada; The Geist Atlas of Canada…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The University of Chicago Press has a blog that talks up their books; of interest to us is the Cartography and Geography category, where you can find links to reviews and discussions of such books as Mark Monmonier’s From Squaw…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Matt Rosenberg has a brief but enthusiastic review of the 13th edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World. “This is a fantastic and beautiful atlas with an amazing collection of maps, satellite images, country information, data and thematic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin has a profile of University of South Carolina geography professor Kristin Dow, one of the co-authors of The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World’s Greatest Challenge. She grew up in Racine, so…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Norman Transcript reports on the publication next month of the fourth edition of the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma; unfortunately (for our purposes), the article focuses on the essays rather than the maps (173 of them), which are dispensed…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze has been reading a book that sounds interesting: Explorers House: National Geographic and the World It Made, by Robert Poole, a former NG executive editor. It’s an insiders’ history of the National Geographic Society, with a focus on the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new book from the University of Chicago Press looks interesting: Cartographies of Travel and Navigation, edited by James R. Akerman, a collection of essays about the history of all kinds of transportation-related maps — railroads, roads, nautical and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Retired University of Maine professor Walter Macdougall has written a biography of early Maine surveyor and mapmaker Moses Greenleaf, the Bangor Daily News reports. Macdougall’s book, Settling the Maine Wilderness: Moses Greenleaf, His Maps, and His Household of Faith, 1777-1834,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Monitor reviews a new book from ESRI Press, A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. “With short, clear, and authoritative definitions of more than 1,800 terms written by more than 150 subject-matter experts, this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two books about programming with the Google Maps API are coming early next year, Google Karten reports: Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax, in the same series as the previously mentioned book about PHP and Ajax, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapHist is abuzz with excitement over the news that an English translation of Christian Jacob’s apparently significant 1992 work on the history of cartography, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History, is now available. Is there any…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The UN Environment Programme’s atlas, One Planet, Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment, was announced in June 2005 and has been available as a free download since at least last February. (You can always buy the book, of course.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jeff Thurston got his hands on what sounds like an interesting book: State Security and Mapping in the German Democratic Republic is a collection of papers on East Germany’s deliberate distortion of its topographical maps. From the publisher’s catalogue…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Travis McDade writes, “I have a book coming out in October about a man who stole books and maps from Columbia University some years ago. The book deals a little with his theft and capture but largely with the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Books about Google’s mapping services continue to appear. Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax is a new book about producing web applications using the Google Maps API and your data, whether your data is small and simple…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alex and James Turnbull of Google Sightseeeing have put together a book that compiles nearly a hundred of their favourite finds. The book will be published in November, under the title of Off the Map in the U.S. and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re in the Boston area, you might be interested in a presentation by Joseph G. Garver on Tuesday, August 22 at the Hingham Public Library: he’ll be talking about his upcoming book, Surveying the Shore: Historic Maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Ubikcan (a blog I really wish I’d found out about sooner) comes word of a relatively new book that sounds like an excellent counterpoint/complement to Seeing Through Maps: The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two forthcoming books on the horizon: A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems (Amazon), a terminology guide from ESRI Press (press release); and Google Earth for Dummies, which is self-explanatory (via Google Earth Blog)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Monmonier appeared on NPR’s “Here and Now” yesterday to promote his new book about controversial place names, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. The interview, which you can listen to with RealPlayer,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new edition of Seeing Through Maps, by Denis Wood, Ward Kaiser and Bob Abramms, is now available. It’s the second edition of the book; the first edition, still available on Amazon.com, came out in 2001. This edition, however,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartography has a review of Else/Where: Mapping — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (web site), a collection of 40 essays; my impression is that the contributors come from a design rather than cartographic background. Meanwhile, on atlas(t), Claire has…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Monitor has a review of Basic GIS Coordinates, a book which addresses the challenge of trying to apply mathematical coordinate models to an inherently irregularly shaped planet. From Matteo’s review: Basic GIS Coordinates explains the progression of ideas that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cartography notes the upcoming launch, during the Canadian Cartographic Association’s 2006 conference this month, of Jeffrey Murray’s upcoming history of Canadian cartography, Terra Nostra, 1550-1950: The Stories Behind Canada’s Maps. The book sounds quite interesting. So does the conference…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Thanks to MapHist, a book about maps and art during the Renaissance has been brought to my attention: art historian Francesca Fiorani’s The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy. This book, according to the publisher, “focuses…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Directions reports that the keynote speaker at this week’s NEGIS conference was professor and author Mark Monmonier, which led me to his web site. Coincidentally, a copy of his classic book, How to Lie with Maps, arrived from Amazon this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Think Globally, Act Locally: GIS and Data Visualization for Social Science and Public Policy Research, is a new textbook from ESRI Press. Authored by San Francisco State University urban studies professor Richard LeGates, the book is part of a project…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Deadly Maps collects every map from a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Threats (Amazon.com listing). From the site: “The first five maps reflect the worldwide proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Martin Brückner’s book, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity, looks at the rise in geographic literacy in the colonial and post-independence periods and the the cultural impact of that literacy. It’s now out in paperback….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jeff Thurston’s contribution to the debate over free geodata looks at the question of scale: if you want geospatial data to be free and updated regularly, consider the huge amount of territory that has to be mapped. Wired’s piece,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Visualizing China’s Future Agriculture is a new atlas — sample pages, sample maps — that is the result of a decade-long collaborative project of the Oregon State University China Working Group. As the Medford News reports, “It is the first…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geographic Atlas of New Zealand looks intriguing, even if the site only has one or two tantalizing images and it isn’t in Amazon.com’s catalogue. Damn it, I want more. Via Cartotalk….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MapHist, I found out about the University of Pennsylvania’s Telsur Project, which maps the variations in English dialect and pronunciation across North America, and is behind the (hella-expensive) Atlas of North American English. See previous entry: Atlas of Language…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Book, edited by Peter Barber, continues to get attention. It was reviewed by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last month: “Barber’s chronological format is easy to browse, fascinating when read in sequence. Each righthand page is a full-color reproduction, usually…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Macworld takes a second look at Google Earth; meanwhile, Google Earth, which was previously Tiger-only, has been quietly made available for OS X 10.3.9. And finally, the first book about Google Earth is finally out — but it’s in German….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Chicago Tribune profiles local map collector Robert A. Holland, whose book, Chicago in Maps, 1612 to 2002, was published late last year. From the article: “In a section of the book Holland thinks of as ‘worlds within worlds,’ the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now that it’s available for the Mac, Macworld reviews Google Earth. Robert Gelb reviews Chandu Thota’s Programming MapPoint in .NET: “The bottom line is that if you are developing anything mapping related with Microsoft components, you gotta buy this book….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The UN atlas One Planet, Many People has been making the rounds of the mapping blogosphere lately — see, for example, Very Spatial and Le Petit Blog Cartographique — probably due to it being featured on the Landsat project news…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Maps Hacks is now out and Directions has a review: “This book, started not long after Google Maps debuted last February, is dated. Google Maps is now known as Google Local. Throughout, we hear about how the software is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A clickable map of Tlingit tribes, clans and clan houses in the Pacific Northwest. Via Plep. MapPoint B2B on the future of MSN Maps and Directions, viz., none: “The time has come to say good-bye to MSN Maps and Directions…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ben Keene, the editor of Oxford University Press’s atlas program (see previous entry), looks at the changes in geography he had to deal with in 2005 (via World Hum). MapQuest has inadvertently left Edmonton off a map of Canadian cities…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Very Spatial reviews Making Maps by John Krygier and Denis Wood, an unusual book that is in my review queue as well. (I’m so profoundly behind on reviews it’s embarrassing, but a review of this book is forthcoming.) Here’s a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chandu Thota announces that his new book, Programming MapPoint in .NET, which covers APIs for MapPoint 2004, MapPoint Web Service, Microsoft Location Server and Virtual Earth, is now available. A sample chapter is available via O’Reilly’s online catalogue, and there’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two Gadling bloggers are dead keen on Oxford’s Atlas of the World, Deluxe Edition; see Erik’s post and Kelly’s earlier post. I had thought that the gold-standard atlas was the Times Comprehensive (at least that appeared to be the consensus…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday’s Grauniad featured a review of three mapping books with a heavy emphasis on the art of cartography: Charles Booth’s 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty, a London Topographical Society reprint that for some reason isn’t on their site; Peter…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Karen Ruby reviews Mapping Hacks: “The book is a good resource to increase your geospatial knowledge by doing, not simply reading. The hacks range from very simple mapping hacks to more complex hacks that require specialized software and coding to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s another big, expensive atlas to tell you about: Cyrus Alai’s General Maps of Persia, 1477-1925. According to Tony Campbell, who wrote the introduction and brought it to our attention on MapHist, Alai spent 15 years examining 1,200 maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Monitor reviews Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: “Brewer’s advice is authoritative, practical, and useful to novice and experienced mapmakers alike. She focuses on just a few key questions — how to design a map so that its layout…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of authors have asked me whether I’d be interested in reviewing their books and where to send them. To aid future inquiries, I’ve now added information about book reviews to the About page: what I’m willing to look…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Gadling points to a new release from über-expensive book publisher Taschen: a reproduction of Joan Blaeu’s 1665 Atlas Maior. The original was in Latin and in 11 volumes; the modern version is nearly 800 pages, weighs 7.2 kg, and, from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The World Atlas of Great Apes and Their Conservation, which I believe was launched yesterday, “provides a comprehensive overview of what is currently known about all six species of great apes — chimpanzee, bonobo, Sumatran orangutan, Bornean orangutan, eastern gorilla,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Directions has a review of Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users, which sounds really interesting: it’s a book about design choices for cartography — i.e., what looks good, what doesn’t. From the review: “[It] covers all…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Barbara Petchenik Children’s Map Competition has been running every two years since 1993; it’s an international award for maps made by children under the age of 15. More information is available at the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

David J. Smith — he of mapping.com — has a review in tomorrow’s Christian Science Monitor of former National Geographic Society editor Harm de Blij’s new book, Why Geography Matters, which apparently is an apologia for geography, geographic and cartographic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

During World War Two, London County Council kept maps showing the damage caused to the city by German bombs. They did it by hand-colouring Ordnance Survey maps, each colour representing a certain amount of damage. Now, the BBC reports, the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A few more reviews of recently published mapping books. Urban Cartography’s review of Mapping Hacks: “[The authors have] made a technical book that is not technical; they’ve made a manual that is automatic; they’ve made a really fun and interesting…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Import Cartography reviews Tyler Mitchell’s Web Mapping Illustrated: “IT and Web professionals looking to break into geospatial and mapping work will find this book to be the ideal starting point, as will those who are graduating from Google map hacks…  •  Continue reading this entry.

We’ve dealt with the questions of where to buy a very big wall-sized world map and which world atlas is best, but these subjects came up on Ask MetaFilter recently, and you might find some of the answers useful: the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Not that I haven’t mentioned Mapping Hacks enough already (see previous entries: Mapping Hacks, Mapping Hacks Now Out), but you might be interested in this pretty thorough review over on Blogcritics….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m overdue in posting this one, which comes to us thanks to James. Tyler Mitchell, whose Web Mapping Illustrated, a guide to free mapping software, is now shipping, had an article up on O’Reilly last month that I think serves…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping Hacks (see previous entry) is finally shipping after some delays; Directions has a review. The book went to press too soon to take account of all the Google Maps hacks that have sprung up in the meantime, so they’ve…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alfred Wainwright’s seven-volume Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells (reissued box set), published between 1955 and 1966, were apparently marvels of art and detail (though I haven’t found any samples online), and have served as the definitive guides to hiking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last year I covered the first volume in Richard Carpenter’s series of historical railroad atlases covering the United States in 1946. I actually got it for Christmas last year: because I’m not familiar with the mid-Atlantic states the first volume…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cristina D’Alessandro-Scarpari reviews A History of Spaces (by John Pickles) for EspacesTemps.net. Not for the academically disinclined: “A History of Spaces is certainly about geography and maps, but it is mainly a questioning of the processes of map-making and of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A new atlas announced Saturday by the UN, titled One Planet, Many People, shows the impact of the last 30 years of human development in a dramatic way, by showing before and after satellite photography of various locations. Sample images…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Karen Wynn Fonstad, the freelance cartographer who authored atlases of Middle-earth, Dragonlance and other fantasy worlds, died March 11 of complications from breast cancer. She was 59. This Toronto Sun article from 2002 reviews her best-known work, The Atlas of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today’s Oregonian has a review of Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, which I see that a few of you have ordered from Amazon via this site. I haven’t had a chance to look at a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

qatsi has a review of Nicholas Crane’s book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet. We’ve seen examples of Mr. Crane’s work before: Profile of Tube Map’s Creator; TV Series About Maps; Triangulation Pillars. (Via and cross-posted to Here Be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping Hacks, forthcoming from O’Reilly, isn’t just a book of tips on everything from using mapping sites to using a GPS to building your own maps (see the table of contents), it’s also a blog. I must confess to being…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Marc asks, “Which is the best overall general-purpose atlas I can buy? My criteria would include depth, detail and quality of design.” There are, of course, several options, including the Great, Hammond, National Geographic (Amazon, National Geographic Store), Oxford University…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last month I finished reading Alan Morantz’s Where Is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell, which I got as a birthday gift last year — it was in the remainder pile. I suppose I should try to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of David Rumsey, whose eponymous web site hosts a massive digital archive of his even more massive private collection of old maps: 10,000 maps — out of a total collection of 150,000! It’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last December, I reported on the massive History of Cartography Project, an expensive, comprehensive multivolume series, the first volume of which came out in 1987. The project was founded by J. B. Harley and David Woodward. Harley died in 1991….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This month’s Fast Company has a profile of Richard Carpenter, who has published the first volume of his Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946. The maps are hand-drawn and hand-lettered; the article provides fascinating details about their creation….  •  Continue reading this entry.