A short interview with Jude Leimer, who joined the History of Cartography Project in 1981 (!) and has served as managing editor for every single volume. (That’s a lot of institutional memory.)
Tag: books
The Library of Lost Maps
When it comes to books that present the maps of a single library or museum—take, for example, Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room, about the Bodleian, or Tom Harper’s Atlas: A World of Maps from the British Library—there seems to be a standard, curatorial template, one that focuses on full-colour reproductions of the maps, each of which is accompanied by a short explanatory text. The maps, as objects, are the point.
The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury, 2025) is about the maps held in the Map Room of University of College London. But author James Cheshire is doing something quite different here. Partly this is because UCL is neither the Bodleian nor the British Library. Their holdings are not remotely similar. There’s no equivalent of the Gough Map or the Selden Map here; the maps are more modern (19th and 20th century) and less rare and singular. UCL’s Map Library was a working map library, used by its staff for teaching and research, rather than something more curatorial.
But what the maps at UCL do have is stories attached—about how they were made, and about how they came to be in UCL’s hands. The Library of Lost Maps is simultaneously a story of the early days of UCL and its role in broadening education in Britain, its role as a repository for so many maps being produced during the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflicts, and its uncertain future as that role of map repository is increasingly seen as obsolete.
Pre-War Japanese Tourist Maps
London stationery store Present & Correct has published a book of vintage illustrated tourist maps from Japan. “In 2025 we found the maps rummaging in Tokyo’s Jinbocho area before photographing & collating them into this 136 page paperback.” Fifty Pre-War Tourist Maps from Japan is available from their website. [Kottke]
A Book Roundup
In a Guardian piece last month, Laura Spinney briefly touches on three books and the ways in which they subvert our understanding of what’s on the map and how we use them to see the world. They are Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes: a New Cartography of Borders and Migration by Henk van Houtum et al. (nai10, 2024); William Rankin’s Radical Cartography (Picador/
Doug Greenfield catches up with the 50 Maps series from Belt Publishing, focusing mainly on the two most recent: Cincinnati in 50 Maps by Nick Swartsell and maps by Andy Woodruff, and Columbus in 50 Maps by Brent Warren and maps by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. (Previously.)
Cincinnati in 50 Maps is one of two books—the other is Alan Wight’s Cincinnati’s Foodshed: An Art Atlas—that are the subject of a 23-minute segment on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition this week, which interviews the authors.
Monsters and Maps
Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.
By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.
- Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters by Surekha Davies. Cambridge University Press, 31 Aug 2017. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
- Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies. University of California Press, 4 Feb 2025. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
The State of The Map Room, Plus New Pages
The State of The Map Room in 2025: On my Patreon, I look back on how this site did in terms of traffic and income over the past year.
Map Books of 2026: Already live, though at this stage there aren’t very many books listed. You know the drill: if you know something’s coming out this year, let me know.
Map Stores: Another work in progress, this is a list of brick-and-mortar map stores around the world. Does not include online stores, or antique map dealers (which are a different category, and could probably use their own page); these are retail stores you can visit during regular hours and buy maps from. For comparison, see Andrew Middleton’s map, which includes non-profit institutions like archives and libraries, and Zhaoxu Sui’s list of global map stores, from which I’ve been cribbing disgracefully.
More on Le Guin’s Maps
The exhibition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s maps at the Architectural Association Gallery in London (previously, previously) wrapped up last Saturday. The Library of America has an interview with Sarah Shin, who co-curated the exhibit and co-edited the accompanying book (which comes out in North America next month). A sample:
I’ve always loved how Le Guin describes writing as translating, asking “What is the other text, the original?” Similarly, I think that drawing maps, for Le Guin, was a way of making visible what already exists elsewhere in the source: “the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them.”
Thanks to Zvi for the tip.
The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin ed. by So Mayer and Sarah Shin. Spiral House, 21 Oct 2025 (U.S. 10 Jan 2026), £23. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
A History of Swiss Cartography
Engineers of Map Art, a book on the history of Swiss cartography that focuses on work done at ETH Zurich, came out in English last September. (The German edition, Ingenieure der Kartenkunst, came out last January.) “This publication provides a comprehensive overview of 170 years of cartography at ETH Zurich and pays tribute to the personalities who have contributed to the development of the discipline. It is published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation and highlights its contribution to science and practice.” Eduard Imhof is covered in chapter 4. It’s available for free download as an open-access PDF; a hard copy can be ordered for CHF 50. Thanks to Peter Wrobel for the tip.
Cincinnati and Columbus in 50 Maps
Two more books from Belt Publishing came out this week, both part of their “50 Maps” series, each focusing on an Ohio city: Cincinnati in 50 Maps, edited by Nick Swartsell and with cartography by Andy Woodruff; and Columbus in 50 Maps, edited by Brent Warren and with cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. They join Cleveland in 50 Maps (2019) and other books in the series that aren’t about Ohio cities. Columbus-based independent news outlet Matter has a feature on Columbus in 50 Maps.
- Cincinnati in 50 Maps ed. by Nick Swartsell; cartography by Andy Woodruff. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
- Columbus in 50 Maps ed. by Brent Warren; cartography by Vicky Johnson-Dahl. Belt, 2 Dec 2025, $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.
Map Books of 2025 Updated, Plus Some Gift Suggestions
It’s the end of November and I’m still finding titles to add to the Map Books of 2025 page. More to the point, I’m only now finding out about books that came out last January. The list is a mix of (1) GIS manuals, (2) academic monographs (many of which shamelessly lifted from Matthew Edney’s 2025 Books in Map History list), and (3) books aimed at the mainstream book market, most of which come out in the second half of the year to take advantage of the holiday season. Peruse the list and you might find something that fits the bill on that front; I’ve marked what look like some possibilities with a icon.
Speaking of which, I’ve done gift guides in the past but lately I haven’t been able to keep up. Fortunately, Andrew Middleton, who runs a map store and kind of has to keep up, has some book suggestions, not all of which came out this year (but then why do they have to). And if you’d like something other than books, or would like to avoid certain online retailers, have a look at what’s on offer via the Independent Map Sellers page.
Ireland: Mapping the Island
RTÉ has published an excerpt from Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, the latest book of cartographic histories published by Birlinn (though Birlinn’s website seems to be offline at the moment).
This book – Ireland – Mapping the Island – is a celebration of the maps of Ireland produced over the centuries. We aim to give our readers a sense of the huge variety of maps that have been drawn and of their value as documents. Quite a number of themes run through the book. We look at the importance of boundaries, what maps tell us about the development of towns and settlements, the ways in which maps have been used to create impressions of place, their role in the development of travel and how they facilitated the emergence of the ‘tourist’. We also look at how others saw us and particularly at the maps produced since the 1930s by the military powers of a number of countries. One central focus is on how we learned about the shape and internal geography of Ireland. Before the development of airplanes and spacecraft, people had to take it on trust that we correctly knew the shape of the island of Ireland. That knowledge had been gradually refined for centuries and the state of knowledge was captured in the maps produced in each era.
Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson. Birlinn, 2 Oct 2025 (U.S. 2 Dec 2025), £30/$45. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Secret Maps, the Book
I didn’t put two and two together. Secret Maps, the British Library exhibition (previously), has an accompanying book, because British Library exhibitions invariably come with books. And that book was already listed on my Map Books of 2025 page: Secret Maps: How they Conceal and Reveal the World by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko, who curated the exhibition, is out now from British Library Publishing; it comes out in the U.S. in a couple of weeks, under the title Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today, from the University of Chicago Press.
Secret Maps by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes and Magdalena Peszko. British Library, 24 Oct 2025, £40. University of Chicago Press, 14 Nov 2025, $39. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Review: GeoAI
Save some room on the AI bandwagon for ArcGIS. This seems to be the central message of GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS, a slim (only 120-page) volume of articles and posts that previously appeared, for the most part, in Esri blogs and publications. They highlight examples and “real-life stories” of how Esri’s machine- and deep-learning tools have been successfully applied in the public, private and non-profit sectors. At a moment when “AI” is invariably a synecdoche for the awfulness that is generative AI, which I will not litigate here, it can be a challenge to remember that machine and deep learning tools, which have been included in ArcGIS since 2008, have all kinds of applications and benefits. (See Esri’s pretrained deep learning models for examples like feature detection, land-cover classification, and object tracking; see also their GeoAI landing page.) Calling these tools “GeoAI” strikes me as a way to package them to appeal to decision makers who are speedrunning their AI rollout, for better or worse. It’s those decision makers that this book is targeted to. Esri has something to sell them: this is the pitch.
I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.
GeoAI: Artificial Intelligence in GIS
ed. by Ismael Chivite, Nicholas Giner and Matt Artz
Esri, 2 Sep 2025, $40
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Review: Earth Shapers
The title of this book does not quite capture what Maxim Samson is doing. Earth Shapers: How We Mapped and Mastered the World, from the Panama Canal to the Baltic Way isn’t really about shaping the earth, at least not in the way you or I might understand it, likewise neither is it about mapping in its literal sense. Samson uses “earth shaping” to mean something very specific: reshaping our world—physically, yes, but also in other ways—to make it “more interconnective,” as he sets out in the introduction.
In keeping with geography’s literal Greek meaning of ‘earth writing’, cultural geographers call attention to the notion that our planet’s various ‘cultural landscapes’, fashioned by humans onto the natural world, can be ‘read’ like story-filled texts. Earth shaping adopts the same principles, but adds to them a specific emphasis on the manifold power of geographical connections. Human history has been written in geographical connection—and when you know what to look for, these stories, both obscure and renowned, are everywhere. This book explores the reasons why we engage with our surroundings through connection, and how, through our actions, we write ourselves and a very specific history into the ground. (p. 2)
This is perhaps more theoretical than it needs to be. One could just as easily note that Samson’s first book, Invisible Lines: Boundaries and Belts That Define the World, was about the lines that divide us; whereas Earth Shapers flips the script and explores the lines that connect us. And in Earth Shapers “lines” are just as important a word as “connect.”
Because everything in this book is a line. Each of this book’s eight chapters focuses on what is basically a connecting line or network of some sort: the Inca Empire’s Qhapaq Ñan; Mozambique’s separated colonial-era railway lines; the absolutely bonkers, 170-km planned linear city called The Line that is being built in northwestern Saudi Arabia (you can see the construction site in satellite imagery: it’s nuts); the Indigenous trails that endured after the imposition of Chicago’s regular street grid; the implications of Korea’s Baekdu-daegan for reunification.
What these lines principally have in common is scale. They’re transformative, but not necessarily in a physical sense. The Panama Canal is the obvious example of literal earth shaping, but the continent-level Great Green Wall, a project to combat desertification in the Sahel, has evolved into something a little less literal. And while the Baltic Way, as a single-day demonstration in 1989, though one that involved two million participants along a 675-km line, was ostensibly ephemeral, it was no less impactful.
It is in part the unexpected diversity of Samson’s wide-ranging examples—the connections between the connections, if that isn’t too meta—that makes Earth Shapers such an engaging read. This is the kind of book that fits in well with other books that gather geographical trivia and oddities, or islands (i.e., the sorts of books that Alastair Bonnett writes), though this one is decidedly more focused and substantive.
Earth Shapers was published in August by Profile Books in the U.K., and will come out in the U.S. from the University of Chicago Press later this month. I received an electronic advance galley from the latter.
Earth Shapers
by Maxim Samson
Profile Books, 7 Aug 2025, £22 / University of Chicago Press, 13 Oct 2025, $30
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop
Two Books Map London
Two books out this year, both from Batsford, explore London through maps. Vincent Westbrook’s Modern London Maps focuses on more than 60 maps from the 20th century. Like many books of this kind, Modern London Maps draws primarily from a single source: the London Archives. Mapping London reviewed it last month: “probably quite close to the book that we would have published.” And out next month, The Boroughs of London collects Mike Hall’s “boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design,” pairing it with commentary by Matt Brown.
- Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook. Batsford, 8 May 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. - The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown. Batsford, 9 Oct 2025, £30.
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.
Related: Map Books of 2025.