books – Page 19 – The Map Room

Books About the Tabula Peutingeriana

Published on 27 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve blogged about the Tabula Peutingeriana before. It was a medieval copy of a fourth- or fifth-century map of the Roman road network. Combined, its 11 sheets form a scroll 6.82 metres long and only 34 centimetres wide, with territories elongated beyond modern recognition; it was basically the classical period’s equivalent of a TripTik or Beck network map. The sole remaining copy is held by the National Library of Austria: it’s too fragile to put on display, though an exception was made for a single day in 2007.

peutinger-books Anyway. During my online meanderings today I stumbled across two academic books about the Tabula that I was previously unaware of: The Medieval Peutinger Map: Imperial Roman Revival in a German Empire by Emily Albu (2014) and Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered by Richard J. A. Talbert (2010). Both from Cambridge University Press, neither cheap.

Buy The Medieval Peutinger Map at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)
Buy Rome’s World at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

Adventures in Academic Cartography

Published on 26 January 201626 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Pulling back the academic veil can be fascinating. I remember one day 25 years ago in my first year of university, when my history professor paused to tell us about his current research project (a biography of an early 20th-century French politician). For a half hour he held the class rapt as he detailed the long effort required to nail down one specific detail in his subject’s life. For me it was a revelation: history was detective work, and therefore exciting stuff. That may have been the moment that sent me to graduate school in history (and not just me—that professor generated more graduate students than anyone else in that department).

I was reminded of that day as I was reading Mark Monmonier’s memoir, Adventures in Academic Cartography, which does much the same thing as my prof did back then: pull back the veil to reveal an entire academic career that was hidden from our view. Monmonier is a familiar name to those of us interested in maps, having published a dozen books—scholarly, erudite but accessible to the lay reader—over the years. (I’ve reviewed three of them myself: How to Lie with Maps, his essential text on how maps persuade and deceive; Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, a look at the politicization of the Mercator projection; and From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, on the politics and controversies behind place names.) But, like my professor, we are largely aware of only one aspect of his career: in Monmonier’s case, the books. Adventures in Academic Cartography, which he self-published in the fall of 2014, fills in the blanks.

Continue reading “Adventures in Academic Cartography” →

The Selden Map

Published on 25 January 201631 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The Nation has a long article by Paula Findlen on the Selden Map, a Chinese watercolour map acquired by the 17th-century jurist and scholar John Selden and bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in 1659. Findlen recounts the origins of the map and its rediscovery in the Bodleian’s vaults in 2008, and describes it in intricate detail. [via]

The map’s rediscovery has set off a flurry of interest and publications (see book list below). Findlen also looks at the scholarly debates about the map. “Brook and Batchelor have both written books about the Selden map, and each scholar takes a somewhat different approach to framing the story and to interpreting a reconstruction of the document’s origins. Yet they concur that this is a Chinese maritime map and a product of late-Ming ambitions, enterprise, and mobility,” she writes.

The Bodleian has a website dedicated to the Selden Map, which includes an online viewer (Flash required). See also Robert Batchelor’s page.

selden-books

Books About the Selden Map:

London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689 by Robert K. Batchelor (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks

Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury [U.S.], House of Anansi [Canada], Profile [U.K.], 2013).
Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks (Canada, U.K.)

The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty by Hongping Annie Nie (Bodleian Libraries, 2014).
Available as a PDF in English and Chinese.

Previously: More Map Books; Two More Map Books.

Mapping the American Revolution

Published on 18 January 201620 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The National Geographic website has an interview with Richard H. Brown and Paul E. Cohen, authors of Revolution: Mapping the Road to American Independence, 1755-1783 (W. W. Norton, October 2015). In the interview, Brown says that “some of the best collections of Revolutionary War maps have been among the least used. Historians tended to use the same maps over and over again to illustrate their narratives. What we did is to take the opposite view. We wanted the maps to tell the story, so we picked maps that we thought would tell the story of the battles best.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

An Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist

Published on 16 January 201620 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Nick Middleton’s Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist (Macmillan, November 2015), a compendium of countries that fall outside the definition of an independent state for one reason or another, is reviewed in Geographical magazine by Chris Fitch. [via] Amazon U.K. | iBooks

Mapping The Drowning Eyes

Published on 14 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

the-drowning-eyes the-drowning-eyes-map

To mark the publication this week of a new fantasy novella, The Drowning Eyes by Emily Foster, the artist hired to create the map, Tim Paul, wrote an essay on how he did it. I’m struck by the lengths he took to “avoid making the map look too European” and by the careful consideration of what a map from that world should look like, which is almost unheard of in the fantasy map business, where maps invariably conform to a very specific style. The end result is a map that evokes portolan charts, replete with windrose lines and looking like it was drawn on vellum. As fantasy maps go, it’s one of the finer executions I’ve seen.

Amazon: paperback (Canada, U.K.), Kindle (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks

For the audiobook version (Amazon, iTunes), the publisher has taken the map and made it interactive: clicking on a location gives you an excerpt from the book. It might not quite be “[the] newest in map technology” but it’s a small and interesting innovation as far as fantasy maps are concerned.

Civitates Orbis Terrarum

Published on 13 January 201614 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Hyperallergic has a review of Cities of the World (Taschen, November 2015), a reprint of colour plates from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, which appeared in six volumes between 1572 and 1617. From Taschen: “Featuring plans, bird’s-eye views, and maps for all major cities in Europe, plus important urban centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this masterwork in urban mapping gives us a comprehensive view of city life at the turn of the 17th century.” Maps from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum can also be viewed online here and here. [via] Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Published on 12 January 201614 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands first appeared (in English translation) in 2010. Since then it seems to have achieved a longevity few books of any sort manage. A pocket edition came out in 2014. On Wikipedia (of all places) there’s a companion to the book, linking to entries for each of the Atlas’s essays. And just last week it was featured on The Paris Review’s blog. (See also this 2013 interview with Schalansky at, appropriately enough, The Island Review.) Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

Metropolis: Mapping the City

Published on 8 January 201614 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Nicolas Crane reviews Jeremy Black’s Metropolis: Mapping the City (Conway, October 2015) for Geographical magazine. “The aim is to explore through time the visualisation of cities, so we start with a terracotta plan of the Mesopotamian holy city of Nippur, in what is now Iraq, then travel through Renaissance cities, New World cities, Imperial cities and mega cities. […] If you’ve ever wondered why cities work, you’ll find the answer in this beautiful book.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

The Railway Atlas of Scotland

Published on 7 January 201614 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Also from Birlinn, The Railway Atlas of Scotland: Two Hundred Years of History in Maps by David Spaven, which came out last October.

Previously: British Railways, Past and Present.

Buy at Amazon U.K.

Glasgow: Mapping the City

Published on 7 January 20167 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

The National’s Alan Taylor reviews Glasgow: Mapping the City by John Moore (Birlinn, October 2015), an illustrated book of maps of the city dating back to the 16th century (via). This is one of several map books published by Birlinn that cover the history of Scotland in maps: previous volumes include Edinburgh: Mapping the City by Christopher Fleet and Daniel MacCannell (2014) and Scotland: Mapping the Nation by Christopher Fleet, Charles W. J. Withers and Margaret Wilkes (2012).

Designing Better Maps Reviewed

Published on 6 January 201614 January 2016 by Jonathan Crowe

Gretchen Peterson reviews the second edition of Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (Esri Press, December 2015). “I’d say it’s much better than the previous edition. All the images have been updated and are now in keeping with modern cartography practices. All the typical things that you need to know are covered from fonts and labels to color and layout.” Buy at Amazon (Canada, U.K.)

Gift Guide: Map Books of 2015

Published on 17 November 201518 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

At about this time of the year I assemble a gift guide that lists some of the noteworthy books about maps that have been published this year. It’s by no means a comprehensive list, but if someone in your life is just a little bit obsessed about maps (and if you don’t have such a person, why don’t you?), and you’re looking for something to get them, this list might be of use.

Some of these books you’ve seen me blog about before; others I’m mentioning for the first time.

Continue reading “Gift Guide: Map Books of 2015” →

Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps

Published on 27 October 201518 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Vargic's Map of the Internet 2.0 (detail)

In January 2014 a teenage design student from Slovakia named Martin Vargic posted a map of the Internet—inspired, he told The Independent, by the xkcd classic—on his DeviantArt page. The map quickly went viral. Since then, he’s been producing maps of all sorts of things—a revised Internet map, a literature map, historical maps, maps of the world after global warming and an ice age, a stereotype map (see previous entry), plus other infographics—at a dizzying pace, most of which are available for sale on his website. Now his maps are being collected in a book, Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps. It’s out now in the U.K. from Penguin imprint Michael Joseph; in North America it’ll be available in December from HarperCollins. Did I mention he’s a teenager?

Map: Exploring the World

Published on 19 October 201518 November 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

The run-up to every holiday season produces a fresh batch of lavishly illustrated map books, and this year does not appear to be an exception. Map: Exploring the World, a collection of “300 stunning maps from all periods and from all around the world,” came out last month from Phaidon Press. The book was assembled by “an international panel of cartographers, academics, map dealers and collectors,” the publisher says; Forbes contributor Bruce Dorminey’s look at this book reveals that one of them was Library of Congress map curator John Hessler.