I’ve been surrounded by maps all my life. As a child, a highlight of family summer holidays was the night before, pouring over road maps, planning every step of our drive from my home in rural English midlands, via the cross-channel ferry, to a rented gîte in France, perhaps in the Dordogne or the Loire Valley. Maps are to me a paragon of design: a true marriage of science and art. In an amazingly compressed space, a well-designed map can be incredibly beautiful at the same time as containing an incredible amount of raw data, more than could be contained in reams of tables or many pages of text.
What makes “spatial” special? This is the central question behind our book, and behind the study of mapping sciences and geographic information systems (GIS).
“Spatial” often involves raw data, such as the coordinate location generated by the GPS receiver in my smartphone. But “spatial” also includes more meaningful information about places, such as the name of my home city of “Melbourne”, called “Naarm” in the Woiwurrung language of the First Peoples of this land. “Spatial” also includes information about the connections and relations between locations and places, such as found on a transport map or narrated in a travelogue. Our book charts the myriad ways spatial information is different and special compared to so many other sorts of information.
On the Map provides a whistlestop tour of the stories behind some of the best-known maps in history (including the Hereford Mappa Mundi, John Snow’s Broad Street cholera outbreak map, and Harry Beck’s London Underground map) as well as many less well-known but no less-fascinating tales of fantastic maps.
I love this book simply because it is a joyful celebration of all things maps and mapping: a compendium of compelling, cheerful, and often incredible stories that provide a glimpse of not only the immense variety and complexity maps, but also their inherent fun.
It is that fun which I think first attracted me to maps and mapping, and still sparks joy for me upon encountering new maps and mapping innovations today.
Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketches of philosophers and explorers through to Google Maps and beyond, Simon Garfield examines how maps both relate and realign our history.
With a historical sweep ranging from Ptolemy to Twitter, Garfield explores the legendary, impassable (and non-existent) mountains of Kong, the role of cartography in combatting cholera, the 17th-century Dutch craze for Atlases, the Norse discovery of America, how a Venetian monk mapped the world from his cell and the Muppets' knack of instant…
Maps are, by their nature, distortions. Maps by necessity simplify, abstract, and abridge the world, lest they approach the 1:1 scale map parodied by Lewis Carrol’s famous Paradox of the Map.
This fundamental contradiction — that maps can only communicate something about the world because they explicitly don’t communicate everything about the world — is the central message of Mark Monmonier’s classic book.
Although not written as a textbook, the book’s systematic and thorough approach to exploring has made it a recommended text in many University cartography courses, even today. Indeed, despite a revolution in mapping technologies over the past 30 years, the core content remains substantially unchanged and just as relevant in the third edition in 2018 as it was when I first read this book in the 1990s.
An instant classic when first published in 1991, How to Lie with Maps revealed how the choices mapmakers make--consciously or unconsciously--mean that every map inevitably presents only one of many possible stories about the places it depicts. The principles Mark Monmonier outlined back then remain true today, despite significant technological changes in the making and use of maps. The introduction and spread of digital maps and mapping software, however, have added new wrinkles to the ever-evolving landscape of modern mapmaking. Fully updated for the digital age, this new edition of How to Lie with Maps examines the myriad ways that…
Longitude tells the remarkable true story of the 18th-century watchmaker, John Harrison, whose groundbreaking timepieces provided the solution to one of the most significant mapping problems in history: knowing where you are when navigating at sea.
The story behind longitude combines a ripping yarn of intrigue, injustice, and interpersonal rivalry with true scientific and engineering innovation that changed the world forever.
Beyond being a great true story, the book always reminds me of the enormous technological challenges behind navigation at sea, something we take for granted in today’s world. Living in Australia, it is also a reminder of the incredible technological feat of the first ever continental sea voyages to this continent, 65,000 years ago, and still only imperfectly understood today.
The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem."
Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in…
No list of books about maps and map making would be complete without the inclusion of an atlas. Nor could any such list be complete without reflecting on the remarkable mapping achievements of First Peoples around the world.
My favorite atlas is the Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia. It is meticulously researched, beautifully presented, and richly narrated. The atlas explores the concepts, technologies, and deep history of mapping by Australian First Peoples and charts the more recent devastating impacts of colonization on Indigenous Australians.
But it also celebrates the rich and vibrant culture of today’s First Peoples in Australia; their incredible diversity of language, culture, art, and science; and their unwavering connection to the land where I live today.
'The Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia has a place on the work table of every Australian student, on the coffee table of every Australian home and on the desk of every Australian political representative.' Senator Patrick DodsonThe Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia is a unique tool for exploring and understanding the lives and cultures of Australia's First Peoples.An atlas can represent - in graphic form - a pattern of human activities in space and time. This second edition of the award-winning Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia opens a window onto the landscape of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives,…
Maps are powerful, useful, functional objects. But mapmaking is also an art, with a long history and tradition of design. That indelible connection between the map room and the art gallery is what I enjoy most in this book.
Each map in this selection from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is accompanied by a thoughtful reflection on the story behind the map and its impact. But it is the maps themselves, reproduced in rich color on high-density, fine-art-book quality paper, that are the main attractions here. I can, and have, spent many hours lost in an exploration of the flourishes, nooks, and curiosities of an individual map.
Immersing myself in an artful map from this book is to be transported to another time and place that is simultaneously endlessly strange and yet comfortingly familiar.
This book explores the stories behind seventy-five extraordinary maps. It includes unique treasures such as the fourteenth-century Gough Map of Great Britain, exquisite portolan charts made in the fifteenth century, the Selden Map of China - the earliest example of Chinese merchant cartography - and an early world map from the medieval Islamic Book of Curiosities, together with more recent examples of fictional places drawn in the twentieth century, such as C.S. Lewis's own map of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien's map of Middle Earth.
As well as the works of famous mapmakers Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, Saxton and Speed, the book…
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
His memoir is rich in anecdotes and admissions. At The Times, Jan Morris threw a manuscript at him, he shared an embarrassing moment with Jacqueline Kennedy, and he got the paper sued for $1 million. Along the way, Rod Laver challenged Stock to a tennis match, he played a clarinet duet with superstar Richard Stoltzman, and he shared a Mafia-spiced brunch with Jerry Orbach.
Me and The Times: My wild ride from elevator operator to New York Times editor, columnist, and change agent (1967-97)
An intimate, unvarnished look at the making of the Sunday sections of The New York Times in their pre-internet heyday, back when they shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation.
Over 30 years, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections, innovating, and troublemaking all the way – getting the paper sued for $1 million, locking horns with legendary editors Abe Rosenthal and Max Frankel, and publishing articles that sent the publisher Punch Sulzberger up the wall.
On one level, his memoir tracks Stock’s amazing career from his elevator job at Bonwit Teller to his accidental entry into journalism to his…
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