The best books on maps and mapmaking

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 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. 

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.

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. 

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.