Tag: globes

Simon Ayrinhac’s Studies of Tolkien’s Maps and Geography, Plus a Middle-earth Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A globe of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Columbus Globes

Simon Ayrinhac is a French physicist who studies the maps and geography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. I stumbled across his page of his talks and articles via the Tolkien Conference I posted about earlier this month. (The page also includes a couple of bibliographies that I will have to steal from in order to update my own reading list.) In French. Lots for me to go through.

Amongst Simon’s articles is one exploring how Tolkien’s Middle-earth can be displayed as a globe, occasioned by the release, by Columbus Globes, of Middle-earth globes in various sizes and levels of detail (12, 26, 30, and 40 cm, all but the smallest illuminated; €25-€399). The problem, which Simon also notices, is that the known parts of Middle-earth take up too much of the globe: it’s actually only a small part of the whole, with the rest of the world only roughly sketched out. (Also, the legendarium of Middle-earth is such that it was only round after a specific catastrophic event, and a lot of the geography did not survive it.)

Luke Jerram’s Mirror Moon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Installation artist Luke Jerram’s past work includes large reproductions of the Earth, Moon, Sun and Mars. His latest is Mirror Moon, a touchable stainless steel globe of the Moon created with NASA topographic data.

A one-metre version of Mirror Moon debuted at the Royal Society last year. A larger, two-metre version is coming to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich next March to mark its 350th anniversary. Jerram discusses the project here.

The World Turned Upside Down and Other Globes: A Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
The World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe sculpture by Mark Wallinger, on the campus of the London School of Economics, surrounded by a few passersby with cameras. The globe shows political borders; the South Pole is at the top. Photo by Geoff Henson, used under a Creative Commons licence.
Geoff Henson (Flickr). Creative Commons BY-ND licence.

Mark Wallinger’s World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe on the LSE campus with the South Pole on top, generated controversy (and vandalism) after its unveiling in 2019 for how it handled contested borders: it shows Lhasa as a capital, Taiwan as a separate country, and omitted Palestine. I mean, it’s on a university campus: controversy about such things was inevitable. Via Mappery; more at Atlas Obscura and Brilliant Maps.

Mappery also points to a 19th-century globular clock that shows the sun’s position at noon on the globe, which I find awfully intriguing, which is to say I want one.

The Library of Congress is changing how it stores its rare globes, replacing acrylic vitrines (heavy, bulky, and potentially off-gassing compounds that put the globes at risk) with archival cardboard cases, which are less sexy but more practical—we’re talking about storage, not display. I’m actually surprised that rare globes had essentially been stored in display cases.

A Globe Safety Tip from xkcd

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe, “Globe Safety,” xkcd, 7 May 2025.

In Wednesday’s xkcd comic, Replogle has apparently been taken over by mad scientists. I’m having a hard time resisting the urge to explain the joke (I doubt many of my readers are physicists, but then I’m not one either). But in a weird Einsteinian way Randall is doing with globes and mass what Carroll, Borges and Eco did with maps and space: assume a 1:1 ratio between the map and the mapped.

Paranneaux Globes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An image from the Paranneaux Globes website, showing a selection of small sculpted globes on metal stands.
Paranneaux Globes

For the past decade, Reynold Mackey of Paranneaux Globes has been sculpting physiographic globes from materials like wood and bronze. There’s not a whole lot of information on his website, a bit more on the Instagram account, but a lot of detail about his methods emerges in his conversation with Evan Applegate on the Very Expensive Maps podcast (episode link: Apple Podcasts, Spotify).

‘An Impossibly Heavy, Large Silver Globe’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“Of all the globes in the Geography & Map Division’s collections, there is one that has always caught my eye: an impossibly heavy, large silver globe tucked away in our stacks, that stands without any depiction of the earth’s physical features at all. The large silver orb instead displays only a coordinate system grid composed of unlabeled latitude and longitude lines.” Meagan Snow writes about the unlikeliest of globes in the Library of Congress’s collection: a precisely machined 34-inch blank metal globe. What on earth it was it used for? Answer unclear: “The intended use of the globe is described as ‘for earth study.’”

The Useless Grandeur of Coronelli’s Great Globes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Constructed in the 1680s for Louis XIV, and measuring nearly four metres in diameter and weighing a couple of tons apiece, Vincenzo Coronelli’s great globes “are a simply amazing celestial and terrestrial pair,” writes Matthew Edney, who saw them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2019. But, he goes on to say,

[T]he globes were effectively useless. Their imposing grandeur made them completely the wrong size to be used effectively. Smaller globes—made with diameters between 0.075–1.7m (3–67″)—could be easily turned to show specific parts of their convex surface. Or, people could enter within much larger globes, called georamas, turning themselves around as necessary to see all parts of the earth on the concave interior surface. Coronelli’s globes were far too large for the former, and far too small for the latter.

This unavoidable reality inverted the usual physical relationship between viewers and globes, undermining the viewer’s usual sense of intellectual domination and converting the globe-viewing experience to one of awe and amazement. As a result, no-one really knew quite what to do with them[.]

Their difficult size and limited utility is why they’ve spent most of their 340-year existence hidden from view, though they’ve been on display since 2005 at the BNF’s François-Mitterrand site (see the above BNF video, in French).

Globes in the Modern Era

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

“In the age of Google Earth, watches that triangulate and cars with built-in GPS, there’s something about a globe—a spherical representation of the world in miniature—that somehow endures.” The Associated Press has a fairly light feature on the relevance and popularity of globes today; the bespoke globes of Bellerby and Co. (whence) are prominently featured, of course (Replogle not so much, oddly), but they’re intermixed with some historical trivia. Not in-depth in the slightest, but something a few newspapers would have found interesting enough to run.

A Book Roundup: Recent New Publications

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Book cover: A History of the World in 500 MapsWriting for Geographical magazine, Katherine Parker reviews A History of the World in 500 Maps by Christian Grataloup (Thames & Hudson, 13 Jul 2023), which was originally published in French in 2019. “[E]ven with 500 maps, there’s a selection process at work that may leave some readers wanting for specific trajectories and topics. For example, although there’s a continual emphasis on economics, commerce and migration, the impact of the Transatlantic slave trade is only lightly addressed. Similarly, Indigenous perspectives are present, but not abundant. However, such critiques of lacuna in subject coverage are inevitable in any book that attempts to include all of human history.” Note that the maps are modern maps of history created for this book, not old maps. UK-only publication. £35. Amazon UK.

Book cover: Esri Map Book Volume 38The 38th volume of the Esri Map Book (Esri, 5 Sep 2023) came out earlier this month. Like the NACIS Atlas of Design (previously),1 it’s a showcase of maps presented at a conference—in this case, maps from the Map Gallery exhibition of Esri’s International User Conference. The Esri Map Book website has a gallery of maps presumably from this volume, and given the number of pages in the book (140) and the number of maps in the gallery (65), it may actually be complete (assuming a two-page spread per map). $30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Book cover: The GlobemakersPeter Bellerby, of bespoke premium globemaker Bellerby & Co. fame, has written a book: The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury) is out today in hardcover in the UK, and in North America on October 17; the ebook is available worldwide as of today. From the publisher: “The Globemakers brings us inside Bellerby’s gorgeous studio to learn how he and his team of cartographers and artists bring these stunning celestial, terrestrial, and planetary objects to life. Along the way he tells stories of his adventure and the luck along the way that shaped the company.” £25/$30. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

From Analemma to Zodiac: Bellerby’s Glossary of Globe Terminology

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Globemaker Bellerby & Co. has posted a glossary of globe terminology that covers more general geographical terms and concepts (equator, hemisphere) as well as things that are mainly found on globes, covering the various mount types, to common features like time dials and analemmas, to calottes (which are the little circles that cover the poles, where the gore points meet; oddly enough “gore” doesn’t get its own listing).

The Fitz Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Fitz Globe (Library of Congress)Last month on the Library of Congress’s map blog, Worlds Revealed, Julie Stoner shared the story of an educational globe with a unique mount invented by author and teacher Ellen Eliza Fitz. “While working as a governess, Fitz imagined a new globe mounting technique, as seen in the globe above, that would facilitate students’ understanding of the Earth’s daily rotation and annual revolution. In 1875, she was granted a patent for her invention. A copy of the patent with a sketch of the design, which can be seen below, is held in the Ellen Eliza Fitz papers at the Watertown Free Public Library in Massachusetts.” Read the rest at Worlds Revealed.

Bellerby’s Globe for Ukraine

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Petrkykivka globe by Bellerby & Co
Bellerby & Co.

Bespoke globemaker Bellerby and Company is putting the finishing touches on a one-of-a-kind globe that will be auctioned to raise funds for the defence and rebuilding of Ukraine. “One of our talented painters, Anastasiya (Nastia), has been in the company close to 5 years. She is hand painting traditional Ukrainian folk art directly on to this unique and special globe.” The globe is inspired by Petrykivka painting. More at their Instagram post.

Lego’s New Globe

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Lego Ideas GlobeIf Lego’s 11,695-piece world map was not enough for you—and believe me, I understand—then they have something else for you: a 2,585-piece globe that’s 40 cm (16 inches) tall, comes with glow-in-the-dark labels, and costs US$200/C$270/£175/€200. The Brothers Brick take a brick-by-brick look2 at the thing from unboxing to assembly. Kenneth Field has one and is not impressed, finding fault with the land shapes and much preferring Lego globes designed by Dirk’s Bricks (previously).