books – Page 8 – The Map Room

History of Cartography Project Updates

Published on 18 September 201918 September 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

The first three volumes of the History of Cartography Project will be published in Chinese next year, “completing a translation project that began in 2014,” the Project announced on Facebook last week.

The Project was one subject of an international seminar on the history of cartography held at Yunnan University last month. Project director Matthew Edney gave the opening remarks, the text of which is here.

Meanwhile, Volume Four is in galleys and is now scheduled for publication in January 2020, and work continues on Volume Five. Volume Six, covering the 20th century, came out in 2015.

(Remember that the first three volumes, plus Volume Six, are available as free downloads.)

Kickstarter for the Book Version of Barely Maps

Published on 29 August 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Earlier this year I told you about Barely Maps, the minimalist map project undertaken by Peter Gorman, who in a series of posters reduced maps to their most cryptic and abstract state. He’s been selling prints on Etsy, but now Peter has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the next phase of his project: a book that collects 100 of his minimalist maps, along with the stories behind their creation.

Peter sent me a proof copy of the book. The cover is as minimalist as you might expect from such a project. The maps are familiar if you’ve been following the Barely Maps project: here they take up an entire right-hand page, with a brief description on the facing page.

Peter is using offset printing to produce this book, which requires a 250-copy minimum print run. Supporting the Kickstarter starts at $39, which gets you one copy of the book and free U.S. shipping. Higher tiers add map prints to the cart. As I write this post, the Kickstarter is about 88 percent of the way to its $10,000 goal.

Reviews of Edney’s Cartography

Published on 22 August 201922 August 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Edney’s Cartography: The Ideal and Its History was published by the University of Chicago Press last April. I have a review copy and a review is in the works. While you’re waiting for me to get said review written, here are a couple of reviews to tide you over: one from Steven Seegel at New Books Network; and one (behind a paywall) at Times Higher Education from Jerry Brotton.

(Incidentally, Seegel is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe: a review of that is forthcoming as well. Brotton has several books to his name: he’s co-author of this year’s Talking Maps, and in 2012 published A History of the World in 12 Maps, which I reviewed here.)

Related: Map Books of 2019.

The Art of Illustrated Maps

Published on 25 July 20196 April 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

Map illustrations. Illustrated maps. Pictorial maps. Map art. There are many different names for a form of mapmaking that is, to appropriate a phrase, “not intended for navigation,” but rather for purposes such as advertising and promotion, political propoganda, decoration, or simply pure art. You may not be able to find your way home with such maps, but that’s not to say they don’t have a purpose.

I’ve reviewed books about maps in this general field before. Stephen J. Hornsby’s Picturing America (reviewed here) explores the rich pictorial map tradition in the United States during the early and mid-20th century. The Art of Map Illustration (reviewed here), on the other hand, is a focused, step-by-step guide to the how of modern-day map illustration.

The Art of Illustrated Maps: A Complete Guide to Creative Mapmaking’s History, Process and Inspiration (HOW Books, October 2015) falls somewhere in between. Written by John Roman, it’s a book that talks about the creative process in considerable detail, and gives many contemporary examples of map illustrations, but tries to place that process in the context of the history of map illustrations.

Continue reading “The Art of Illustrated Maps” →

Talking Maps

Published on 5 July 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Talking Maps, opening today at the Bodleian Libraries, is a major new map exhibition featuring maps from the Bodleian’s collections.

Highlights on show include the Gough Map, the earliest surviving map showing Great Britain in a recognizable form, the Selden Map, a late Ming map of the South China Sea, and fictional maps by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Map treasures from the Libraries’ collection will be shown alongside specially commissioned 3D installations and artworks, and exciting works on loan from artists and other institutions.

The exhibition is co-curated by Jerry Brotton, who among other things wrote A History of the World in Twelve Maps (my review) and Bodleian map librarian Nick Millea. They’ve co-authored a companion book to the exhibition, also out today, and also called Talking Maps (Bodleian).

The Bodleian is also publishing a number of other map books to coincide with the exhibition, including Mark Ashworth’s Why North is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From (Bodleian) and Brotton and Millea’s Fifty Maps and the Stories They Tell (Bodleian).

(See the Map Books of 2019 page for more Bodleian titles.)

Talking Maps opens today and runs until 8 March 2020. Free admission. More information from the Bodleian and Queen Mary University of London (where Brotton teaches).

Maps from the Bodleian Library were previously featured in Debbie Hall’s Treasures from the Map Room (Bodleian, 2016), reviewed here.

The History of the Netherlands in 100 Old Maps

Published on 4 July 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Briefly noted: the publication last month of Marieke van Delft and Reinder Storm’s De Geschiedeneis van Nederland in 100 Oude Kaarten (Lannoo), whose title, for the 98.6 percent of you who are not visiting this website from the Netherlands, translates as The History of the Netherlands in 100 Old Maps, which makes it the same sort of book as Susan Schulten’s History of America in 100 Maps (reviewed here), only about the Netherlands. And in Dutch. It’s not listed at every Amazon store (and at the moment is not in stock where it is listed), but it’s available (at a discount) from the publisher.

Marleen Smit contributed to the book; here’s her post about it (in English). There’s a brief promotional video (in Dutch).

Wayfinding: A New Book about the Neuroscience of Navigation

Published on 10 June 201911 June 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

M. R. O’Connor’s book Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World came out in April from St. Martin’s Press. Not coincidentally, she’s published a couple of pieces on the subject of that book, both of which focus on humans’ ability to pay attention to their surroundings, and the effect that relying on GPS directions might have on that ability. In a piece for Undark, O’Connor argues that “our unshakeable trust in GPS,” which traces itself back through hundreds of years of believing in the infallibility of maps, gets us lost because we’re relying on the device rather than our senses. Her piece for the Washington Post focuses on the role of the hippocampus in navigation and spatial awareness, and the need to exercise that part of the brain.

This is not the first book on the subject: Greg Milner published Pinpoint in 2016 (previously). See also: Satnavs and ‘Switching Off’ the Brain.

I’ve given the Map Books of 2019 page another update. At the moment it lists 31 books that have come out or are scheduled to come out this year. This list is always changing as publication schedules are adjusted and I learn about new books. As always, if there’s a book that should be on this list, let me know.

The Minimal Geography Atlas

Published on 15 February 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Our friend Alejandro Polanco’s latest project is The Minimal Geography Atlas, a collection of 40 thematic maps.

In my work as a map designer and science writer, I have collected over the past two decades hundreds of curious stories related to cartography or geography. These stories have seen the light of day in the form of hundreds of articles in magazines and blogs, as well as in posters or maps of very diverse types. Now, I’ve decided to compile my best maps and lesser-known but interesting curiosities from all that material I’ve collected over the years. The result is this book, an atlas designed to awaken your curiosity. The thematic maps that I have selected are part of the ones that I have created in the last years, improving them and adapting them for this book.

Alejandro is currently running a Kickstarter for the book. €18 gets you the digital edition, €65 the print edition (in softcover).

Previously: Alejandro Polanco’s Minimal Geography; Alejandro Polanco’s Lost Worlds.

Another Book Roundup

Published on 11 January 201911 January 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Thomas Reinertsen Berg’s Theater of the World is reviewed in the Washington Post by Lorraine Berry. See previous entry. [WMS]

The Huffington Post excerpts some maps from The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps, and talks a bit with the book’s author, Edward Brooke-Hitching. [WMS]

The British newspaper i looks at a recent rush of coffee-table map books, starting with DK’s History of the World Map by Map: they interview retired journalist Peter Snow, who wrote the introduction to that book. [WMS]

We’ve seen a flurry of pieces about the future of paper maps lately; that’s the jumping-off point for PBS News Hour’s interview with Betsy Mason, one of the co-authors of All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey, which I reviewed last month. [NYPL]

The Map Books of 2019 page lists all the books scheduled to come out this year—at least the ones I’m aware of. If there’s a book coming out in 2019 that should be on this page, let me know.

So far there are not many books listed, but that will change as the year progresses. Also keep in mind that publication dates shift all the time: keeping on top of those changes can be a sisyphean task, but I’ll do my best.

All Over the Map

Published on 20 December 20186 April 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

What works online does not necessarily translate very well into a book, but All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey (National Geographic, October), a very fine book from our friends Betsy Mason and Greg Miller, is strong evidence to the contrary.

For the last two and a half years, Betsy and Greg have written a blog of the same name for National Geographic; from 2013 to 2015 they did the same thing with Map Lab, a map blog for Wired. Their background with regard to maps is similar to mine: “We are not experts in cartography or its history; we’re journalists with a lifelong love of maps who were eager to learn more,” they write in the book’s introduction.

Continue reading “All Over the Map” →

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 15th Edition

Published on 14 December 20186 October 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

How exactly do you review an atlas?

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World (HarperCollins) is the flagship of the Times World Atlas line. (The others, in descending order of size and price, are the Concise, the Universal, the Reference, the Desktop and the Mini.)¹ It’s the latest in a long line of Times atlases, tracing its heritage to the original 1895 atlas published by the Times and the 1922 Times Survey Atlas of the World produced by the venerable Scottish mapmaking firm, John Bartholomew and Son. Like its predecessors, it’s absolutely gargantuan: with the slipcase, it’s 47 × 32.5 cm (16.5 × 12.8 inches) in size and weighs 5.7 kg (12.6 lb). Only the National Geographic Atlas of the World is a little bit larger, and even it weighs less than the Comprehensive (4.5 kg or 9.9 lb).²

The 15th edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas came out on 6 September 2018 (and on 15 November 2018 in North America). HarperCollins has sent me a review copy, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about it.

Continue reading “The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, 15th Edition” →

Crowdfunding a Book of James Niehues’s Ski Resort Art

Published on 12 December 201812 December 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

We’ve talked about James Niehues before: the legendary artist has painted hundreds of maps of ski resorts and recreational areas since the late 1980s. I was excited to learn that he’s producing a coffee table book that includes all of his maps. It’s being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Pledging $75 or more gets you a copy of the book; other pledge levels get you a high-quality print. Clearly there’s some interest: at the moment the project has raised more than $223,000 from nearly 2,000 backers, 28 times its target of $8,000, with three weeks still to go. [Kottke]

Previously: A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist; James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.

Map Gifts for Children

Published on 5 December 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

On The Map Room’s Facebook page I was asked, in the context of this year’s gift guide, whether I had any suggestions for younger readers. All I could come up with was The Ultimate Mapping Guide for Kids. Writing in the Guardian, Vivien Godfrey of Stanfords does rather better than I did, providing a list of maps, books, games and puzzles for children. Very much British-focused. [WMS]