Tag: books

The Sky Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

On page 96 the author notes that “the actual mapping of the heavens did not exist” in medieval Europe; on page 98, that “celestial cartography awaited its invention.” That these words appear nearly 40 percent of the way through The Sky Atlas (Simon & Schuster UK, 2019) should hint at what this book does and does not do. Despite appearances, this is not strictly speaking a history of celestial cartography. Do star maps appear, and are they discussed? Certainly. Absolutely. But not to the extent you might expect.

To the extent that this is a book by Edward Brooke-Hitching, whom you may remember from The Phantom Atlas (reviewed here) or The Golden Atlas (not seen), there are some thing that are familiar, at least in terms of design and presentation. The Sky Atlas is an illustrated history of observational astronomy from the ancients to the present day, aimed at a general audience, with short, digestible chapters. It’s expansive and inclusive—there are chapters on Jain and Mesoamerican astronomy, for example. And it has, as you might expect, lots and lots of illustrations, which given the timeline and scope of the book means artistic representations and maps of the skies from every era and multiple cultures.

You’re not getting what what you see in Nick Kanas’s Star Maps (reviewed here)—deep dives on specific celestial cartographers and their work (in Kanas’s case, from a collector’s perspective). The Sky Atlas gives celestial cartography a more ancillary role. Apart from a chapter on Hevelius, most of the text about maps takes place in the captions. Now in a book this illustrated there are a lot of captions, and the captions are not terse. But the maps themselves are there to illustrate and document the observations and discoveries that are the focus of this book—interesting in and of themselves, but not the main focus of the narrative. There is, to be sure, less of an audience for celestial cartography pur et dur, and this is a book for a general audience. So the direction the book takes is understandable. And as a collection of maps and illustrations it is quite lovely; as I said about The Phantom Atlas, “it’s the kind of map book you look at as much as you read it.” Even so, when something doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin, it should be noted.

Got this one from my public library.

The Sky Atlas by Edward Brooke-Hitching. Simon & Schuster UK, 17 Oct 2019, £25 (U.K. edition); Chronicle, 25 Feb 2020, $35 (U.S. edition). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. An engraved map of 18th-century London in 24 panels.
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. Map on 24 sheets, 203 × 385 cm. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by journalist W. Crawford Snowdon that was published to mark the map’s 200th anniversary. The new edition, out from Atlantic Publishing, is updated with better-quality map reproductions and additional illustrations. The “street-by-street” subtitle kind of pitches it as an 18th-century A to Z map. BBC News, Daily Mail, Londonist.

The map itself is available online: see the Library of Congress’s version. Rocque published a smaller-scale map of London in the same year, for which see this Royal Museums Greenwich article.

London in the 18th Century: Street by Street—John Rocque 
by W. Crawford Snowden
Atlantic Publishing, 5 Mar 2026, £25. 
Amazon (Canada, UK)

The Library of Lost Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: 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.

Continue reading “The Library of Lost Maps” →

A Book Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for Free the Map, Radical Cartography and Secret Maps.

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/Viking, 2025); and Secret Maps, the book accompanying the exhibition of the same name (British Library/University of Chicago Press, 2025).

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

The State of The Map Room, Plus New Pages

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: Engineers of Map Art

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for Cincinnati in 50 Maps 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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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).

Book cover: Ireland: Mapping the Island

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Both the U.K. and U.S. covers of Secret Maps, a book accompanying a British Library exhibition of the same name.

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

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book cover: 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