I can’t explain how I missed this one when it came out last fall. You Are Here: Tales of Cartographic Wonders is an anthology of 18 science fiction and fantasy stories about maps. Edited by N. E. White, it includes one story I’ve seen before: Charlotte Ashley’s “Eleusinian Mysteries.” I look forward to reading the others and reporting back. Amazon | iBooks
Tag: books
Oxford Atlas of the World Updated, Reviewed
The Oxford Atlas of the World touts itself as the only world atlas series that gets updated every year. Unlike the Times and National Geographic series it doesn’t come in multiple sizes: there’s just the one, which is roughly equivalent to the Times Concise in size and page count but cheaper ($90 vs. $125). The next edition is the 24th, and it comes out later this fall; the changes are spelled out on the publisher’s page (adopting “Czechia” is one of them, for example). G. T. Dempsey has a review at Geo Lounge.
New Map Books for September 2017
Map books coming out this month:
The Art of Cartographics (Goodman) is available now in the U.K. but won’t come out in North America until March 2018. The publisher describes it as “a stunning collection of maps designed in a unique way. […] This carefully curated book selects the most creative and interesting map design projects from around the world, and offers inspiration for designers and map-lovers alike. Covering themes including power, gentrification, literature, animals, plants and food, and showcasing handrawn, painted, digital, 3D sculpted and folded maps, Cartographics offers a slice of social history that is as beautiful as it is fascinating.” Buy at Amazon U.K. | Pre-order at Amazon
In a similar vein, while the British edition of Where the Animals Go, a compendium of spectacular maps of animal paths, came out last November, U.S. readers have had to wait until now: W. W. Norton is publishing the U.S. edition, and it comes out next week. Buy at Amazon
Also out next week: the National Geographic Atlas of Beer (National Geographic). I have no information about the quantity or quality of the maps therein, but according to the publisher the book does have some: “The most visually stunning and comprehensive beer atlas available, this richly illustrated book includes more beers and more countries than any other book of its kind. Including beer recommendations from Garrett Oliver, the famed brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, and written by ‘beer geographers’ Nancy Hoalst-Pullen and Mark Patterson, this indispensable guide features more than 100 illuminating maps and over 200 beautiful color photos.” Buy at Amazon
Related: Map Books of 2017.
Alastair Bonnett’s Beyond the Map
Alastair Bonnett’s latest book, Beyond the Map, is out today in the U.K. from Aurum Books. An exploration of “thirty-nine extraordinary places, each of which challenges us to re-imagine the world around us,” including disputed enclaves, emerging islands and other idiosyncracies of geography, Beyond the Map looks like a follow-up to his 2014 book, Off the Map (published in North America as Unruly Places), which I reviewed in February 2015.
Related: Map Books of 2017.
More on Patents and Cartographic Inventions
Earlier this year I mentioned the publication of Mark Monmonier’s latest book, Patents and Cartographic Inventions. This week at All Over the Map, Betsy Mason does a bit more than mention the book, with a closer look at some of the more unusual patents from Monmonier’s book: an early voice navigation system, a map folding method, and a rural address system. (None of which caught on, of course.)
Women and Cartography in the Progressive Era
Christina E. Dando’s Women and Cartography in the Progressive Era (Routledge) came out earlier this month. From the publisher: “As women became more mobile (physically, socially, politically), they used and created geographic knowledge and maps. […] Long overlooked, this women’s work represents maps and mapping that today we would term community or participatory mapping, critical cartography and public geography. These historic examples of women-generated mapping represent the adoption of cartography and geography as part of women’s work. […] This study explores the implications of women’s use of this technology in creating and presenting information and knowledge and wielding it to their own ends.” [WMS]
Related: Map Books of 2017.
If Maps Could Speak
Richard Kirwan, a former director of Ordnance Survey Ireland, published a memoir in 2010 called If Maps Could Speak (Londubh). That memoir is now available in an ebook edition—or at least it is for the Kindle; I couldn’t find it in other ebook stores. [WMS]
The Cartographer’s Daughter
Noting for future reference: The Cartographer’s Daughter, a middle grade novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave that came out last November from Knopf. “[W]hen a series of mysterious events shakes the community, it’s Isabella—daughter to the island’s only mapmaker—who will lead a party of explorers into the forest in search of answers.”
A lot of things accumulated in my inbox during the move, and the backlog is kind of overwhelming right now, but I’ve finally updated the Map Books of 2017 page to include all the books that came to my attention during that time.
Speaking of backlogs, I still have several books in my reviewing queue, which I hope to be able to tackle soon.
And speaking of reviews: publicists should note that while my mailing address has not changed, my street address has. If you’re sending me review copies by any means other than the postal service, please contact me to get my new street address. (See also my reviewing guidelines.)
Children Map the World, Volume 4
So it turns out that the Children Map the World series, which collects entries from the Barbara Petchenik Children’s World Map Drawing Competition, is still a going concern: the fourth volume, which includes 50 maps drawn by children aged 5 to 15 for the 2015 competition plus another 50 maps from previous competitions, came out last month from Esri Press. Amazon. [Caitlin Dempsey]
Previously: Children Map the World: The Book; Children Map the World, Volume Two.
Maps and Empire: New Books
Three academic books out this month deal with the subject of mapping, surveying, and empire-building:
The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence by S. Max Edelson (Harvard University Press) covers the period between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. From the publisher:
Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.
Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.
Maps and visualizations to accompany the book are available online.
The First Mapping of America: The General Survey of British North America by Alex Johnson (I. B. Tauris) seems to cover similar territory, if you’ll pardon the pun, though I have very little information about it. [Amazon]
Finally, Daniel Foliard’s Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 (University of Chicago Press) “vividly illustrates how the British first defined the Middle East as a geopolitical and cartographic region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their imperial maps. Until then, the region had never been clearly distinguished from ‘the East’ or ‘the Orient.’ In the course of their colonial activities, however, the British began to conceive of the Middle East as a separate and distinct part of the world, with consequences that continue to be felt today.” [Amazon, iBooks]
Related: Map Books of 2017.
Whither the Waters
Out this month from the University of New Mexico Press: John L. Kessell’s Whither the Waters: Mapping the Great Basin from Bernardo de Miera to John C. Frémont, a relatively short book that places 18th-century colonial New Mexican artist and cartographer Bernardo de Miera in his historical context and explores how later cartographers made use of his work. The Santa Fe New Mexican covers the launch of the book with a look at both author and subject. Amazon. [WMS]
Patents and Cartographic Inventions
Published late last month, Mark Monmonier’s new book, Patents and Cartographic Inventions: A New Perspective for Map History (Palgrave Macmillan) is on a somewhat more arcane and non-obvious subject than his usual fare. It’s an exploration of the U.S. patent system that focuses on map- and navigation-related inventions. The publisher’s description: “In probing evolving notions of novelty, non-obviousness, and cumulative innovation, Mark Monmonier examines rural address guides, folding schemes, world map projections, diverse improvements of the terrestrial globe, mechanical route-following machines that anticipated the GPS navigator, and the early electrical you-are-here mall map, which opened the way for digital cartography and provided fodder for patent trolls, who treat the patent largely as a license to litigate.” Actually sounds interesting as hell; the book is quite expensive, though. Amazon, iBooks.
Maps of Delhi
Pilar Maria Guerrieri’s Maps of Delhi, a collection of 66 maps from the 19th century to the present day, comes out from Niyogi Books in August. Nevertheless, the wire service IANS has an article about it now: it reveals how the book came about because the author wished it had been available when she began working on her doctorate.
“While I was searching specifically for the pre and post independence maps in several Indian archives and institutions, I slowly found and collected all the other documents. At the end of my PhD I realised that if I had the complete collection of maps at the beginning of my studies, my research would have been much more easier and smoother. I decided to publish the whole collection with the aim that it will turn to be useful for scholars interested in understanding the capital of India,” Guerrieri told IANS in an interview.
Picturing America
Meanwhile, at All Over the Map, Greg Miller has a look at another professor with another book: Stephen J. Hornsby, who curated an exhibition of American pictorial maps at the Osher Map Library last year, has published a book on the subject: Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, out last month from University of Chicago Press (Amazon, iBooks). Miller’s post includes an interview with Hornsby and a sample gallery of some of Hornsby’s pictorial maps.