Tag: books

Power Lines

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Out this month from Black Dog & Leventhal: Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World by Peter Keating. From the publisher:

Cover art for Power Lines by Peter Keating.

In this book, award-winning journalist Peter Keating has assembled dozens of the most significant maps in history. There is the map featuring the Treaty of Tordesillas meridian, which Spain and Portugal used to divide the whole of the Western Hemisphere in 1494. The map deployed by Western leaders at the 1884 Berlin Conference to carve up Africa. A map of Adolf Hitler’s speaking engagements in 1933 that looks like a rock concert tour poster. Maps of gerrymandering. Of redlining. Of military targets and of peace treaties. The map of the world—distortions and all—that hangs on thousands of classroom walls. And the polarizing red-and-blue election results maps that Americans are confronted with every two years. In striking images and riveting stories that span continents and centuries, Keating makes a compelling case for why, in the age of the internet, the power of maps—to define borders, to influence social policy, to enact political change—is unmatched, and is as potent as ever before.

Buy: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Boston in 50 Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Out this week from Belt Publishing: Boston in 50 Maps by Andy Woodruff. From the publisher:

Cover image for Boston in 50 Maps

Covering four distinct categories (“The Making of Boston,” “The Lay of the Land,” “Getting Around,” and “People and Culture” ), Andy Woodruff’s newly created, original maps investigate all facets of Boston’s past and present. In unraveling the many complex layers that comprise the “real” Boston, some explorations are expected: sports championships, universities, and pothole complaints. Others, such as the former cow paths that predated downtown streets, are decidedly more hidden.

Dig into the city’s history with a guided tour through Revolutionary War sites, landmarks of nineteenth-century Black Boston, and notable “first in the nation” events (like the first recorded UFO sighting). Uncover the structural forces that shaped the social and lived experience of Boston, with maps showing the impact of redlining, urban renewal practices, and the busing crisis of the 1970s. Discover how the city’s boundaries evolved through annexation and landfill and how they’ll continue to change due to coastal flooding risks. Explore some of Boston’s most unique quirks through surprising revelations about the density of Dunkin’ locations, the distinctive architecture of three-deckers, and the spread of the infamous Great Molasses Flood.

Buy: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Andy previously co-authored the Bostonography site with Tim Wallace; in his page about his book he talks about what carried over from that project (only a few, actually) and what was new. Andy’s other work has been featured here several times before: start here.

This is the latest iteration of Belt’s 50 Maps series. Next up, scheduled for November, is The Twin Cities in 50 Maps by Jake Steinberg. Preorder: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Previously: Cincinnati and Columbus in 50 Maps.

Review: This Way Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover art for This Way Up, a book by the Map Men Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman.

It’s been ten years since Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman teamed up to form Voltron launch an occasional and irregular series of videos about maps. They called themselves the Avengers Map Men, and in each episode, sandwiched between the catchy theme song1 and the long ad break for Surfshark, they took as their subject an odd map or cartographic situation and proceeded to say a lot of smart things in a very silly fashion.

Now those videos have led to a book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters), which came out last fall to no small amount of fanfare and promotion, and we get to see whether the schtick that works on YouTube is translatable to the printed page. It turns out that the answer is, kind of.

Continue reading “Review: This Way Up” →

The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer at 50

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Fifty years after it first came out, and ten years after the sale of DeLorme to Garmin spooked Mainers who worried that it would be going away, the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer remains a cultural icon in the state, according to this piece in the Portland Press-Herald. When half the state doesn’t have cell service, it makes sense to keep a dog-eared copy in your vehicle.

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Second Edition

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A new edition of the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (the first edition was published in 2010) came out earlier this month from Yale University Press. From the publisher:

Cover for Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

In the first edition of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, two leading historians explored details of the 350-year history of African slave traffic to the New World. They showed, with nearly 200 original maps, where the captives came from, how long the journeys lasted, how many died on the voyages, and what the ports and destinations were. They also presented details about the trade itself, including the economics.

In this groundbreaking revised edition, 25 new maps locate the major language groups involved in the traffic and show the movement of Africans from the interior of the continent to the Americas, as well as from one part of the Americas to another. Accompanying the maps, as in the first edition, are revealing illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries.

With up-to-date information drawn from the database Slave Voyages, with its records of more than 36,000 voyages, the atlas provides the fullest possible picture of the extent and inhumanity of one of the largest forced migrations in history.

Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed., by David Eltis, David Richardson and Philip Misevich. Yale University Press, 7 Apr 2026, $65. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

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.