Author: Jonathan Crowe

Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room. His essays and reviews have been published by AE, Calafia, The New York Review of Science Fiction, the Ottawa Citizen, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.

Book Roundup for March 2017

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Out this month: the English translation of Andrea Carandini’s massive two-volume, 1300-page Atlas of Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press), which “provides a comprehensive archaeological survey of the city of Rome from prehistory to the early medieval period.” See the book’s website. [Amazon]

Other books seeing publication this month: Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps by Stephen J. Hornsby (University of Chicago Press), a history of the pictorial map art form during the 20th century [Amazon]; and Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian by Charles W. J. Withers (Harvard University Press), a history of prime meridians and the standardization thereof [Amazon].

An update: Mapping the Holy Land (I. B. Tauris) which I originally understood to be coming out in January, is now slated for publication this week. [Amazon]

Related: Map Books of 2017.

Map Exhibitions Around the World

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Mapping the Philippine Seas, an exhibition of 165 maps and sea charts of the Philippine archipelago from the 16th to the 19th century from the private collections of the Philippine Map Collectors Society. At the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Opened 15 March, runs until 29 April. BusinessWorld. [WMS]

The Osher Map Library’s next exhibition, To Conquer or Submit? America Views the Great War, opens this Thursday (Facebook, Eventbrite). It “commemorates and explores American participation in the Great War—the ‘War to End All Wars’—with a sample of informative and propagandistic posters, maps, and atlases” from the Osher collections, which are based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

The World According to Blaeu: Joan Blaeu’s 1648 map of the world, more than two by three metres in size, will be on display at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam from 14 April to 31 December. [WMS]

The Peters Projection Comes to Boston’s Public Schools

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Gall-Peters projection (Wikimedia Commons)

In a development that just might make academic cartographers pull out their remaining hair in frustration, Boston’s public schools began using the Peters projection in social studies classes last week. The news coverage (see the Grauniad’s) is the usual straw man argument about the Mercator and the false dichotomy between it and the Peters, as though no other map projections have ever been used. (National Geographic has been using other projections since the 1920s, and currently uses the Winkel tripel. The last time I was at a map store, hardly any of the world maps for sale used the Mercator. See Mark Monmonier’s Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection, which I reviewed in 2008.)

Regions and Seasons

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A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center: Regions and Seasons: Mapping Climate Through History. “In this exhibition, you will discover how ‘Venti’ were wind personas who directed ancient ships and ‘Horae’ were goddesses of the seasons who dictated natural order during the 15th-17th centuries, how Enlightenment scientists started to collect and map weather data, and how 19th century geographers reflecting the golden age of thematic cartography created innovative techniques to represent vast amounts of statistical data and developed complex maps furthering our understanding of climatic regions.” Runs through August 27; also online.

Mapping Fossil Sites

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The PBDB Navigator is a map-based interface to the Paleobiology Database, which among other things includes the locations of every fossil find. A map of every fossil site seems straightforward enough, but there are hidden depths to this one: you can filter by taxonomy (want to look up the fossil sites for eurypterids or tyrannosaurs? no problem!) or by geologic period, but what’s especially neat is that you can factor in continental drift: when searching by geologic period (the Permian, for example), you can show the continents as they were positioned during that period (see above). More at Popular Mechanics. [Leventhal]

Eleanor Lutz’s Goddesses of Venus

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Last year Eleanor Lutz published a medieval map of Mars that, while not strictly medieval in style, was a magnificent application of an ostensibly old aesthetic to a very modern map subject. Now she’s produced a sequel: The Goddesses of Venus is an annotated map that explores the etymological origins of each of Venus’s features, nearly all of which are named after women or female mythological figures. [Kottke]

Previously: ‘Here There Be Robots’: Eleanor Lutz’s Map of Mars.

Rodney W. Shirley

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According to a Facebook post by the Washington Map Society’s Bert Johnson, Rodney W. Shirley, the author of several books of cartographic antiquarian research, including The Mapping of the World, Courtiers and Cannibals, Angels and Amazons, and other titles on early printed maps, died last Saturday. I have not been able to find an obituary or other notice; I will update this post if I do.

A ‘Serio-Comic Map’ for the Modern Age

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Last December political cartoonist Andy Davey posted a modern-day caricature map that hearkens back to the eve of the First World War, when such “serio-comic” cartographic portraits were common, but fully up-to-date and relevant to the Trump-Putin era. [Maps on the Web]

Cartographers’ Stories

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Daniel Huffman and John Nelson have launched A Cartographer’s Story, a website that collects personal essays from mapmakers.

While our community has a rich culture of sharing project walkthroughs and clever tricks, our colleagues also need to hear about the personal and emotional relationships we have with our maps. We invest ourselves in creating works that are meant to stir the hearts and imaginations of others—and in return our works invest in us. What are your stories? How has mapping moved you or changed you? Did it encourage you through a tough time? Teach you something about yourself? Represent a significant relationship in your life?

Seven stories posted so far; they’re looking for more.