84 books like How the States Got Their Shapes

By Mark Stein,

Here are 84 books that How the States Got Their Shapes fans have personally recommended if you like How the States Got Their Shapes. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World

Joshua Hagen Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on maps and cartography.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.

Joshua's book list on maps and cartography

Joshua Hagen Why did Joshua love this book?

The book’s title immediately drew me in. Atlases and maps obviously help make things visible, so atlas and invisible did not seem like two words that belonged together. In actuality, the title was a bit misleading, albeit effective in gaining my attention.

Cheshire and Uberti provide over 200 different maps and other spatial visualizations of a wide range of things that are generally unseen or at least difficult to see but can be gainfully mapped out to better understand the world. Examples range from the geographies of telecommunication and shipping routes to glacial movements and wildfires.

The illustrations were striking and plentiful, matched by well-written text. The book certainly gave me lots to think about.

By James Cheshire, Oliver Uberti,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Atlas of the Invisible as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Award-winning geographer-designer team James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti transform enormous datasets into rich maps and cutting-edge visualizations. In this triumph of visual storytelling, they uncover truths about our past, reveal who we are today, and highlight what we face in the years ahead. With their joyfully inquisitive approach, Cheshire and Uberti explore happiness levels around the globe, trace the undersea cables and cell towers that connect us, examine hidden scars of geopolitics, and illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj. Years in the making, Atlas of the Invisible invites readers to marvel at the promise…


Book cover of All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey

Joshua Hagen Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on maps and cartography.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.

Joshua's book list on maps and cartography

Joshua Hagen Why did Joshua love this book?

After flipping through a few pages, I was immediately engrossed by this book’s exquisite and thought-provoking illustrations. Mason and Miller showcase many cartographic techniques beyond what we commonly consider a map, ranging in scale from the globe to mountain ranges and river basins to cities and neighborhoods to factory floors. 

I was struck by the blend of creativity and artistry that went into creating these maps and how well this book showcased the wide range of possibilities for representing almost anything visually and cartographically. Including approximately 300 illustrations, the book has the feel of a coffee-table book and can be easily broken down and read in short chunks, although I found it hard to put down.

By Betsy Mason, Greg Miller,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked All Over the Map as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Created for map lovers by map lovers, this book explores the intriguing stories behind maps across history and illuminates how the ancient art of cartography still thrives today.

In this visually stunning book, award-winning journalists Betsy Mason and Greg Miller--authors of the National Geographic cartography blog "All Over the Map"--explore the intriguing stories behind maps from a wide variety of cultures, civilizations, and time periods. Based on interviews with scores of leading cartographers, curators, historians, and scholars, this is a remarkable selection of fascinating and unusual maps--some never before published.
This diverse compendium includes ancient maps of dragon-filled seas, elaborate…


Book cover of The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

Joshua Hagen Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on maps and cartography.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.

Joshua's book list on maps and cartography

Joshua Hagen Why did Joshua love this book?

I was struck by this book’s unusual topic and perspective, namely focusing on maps in fantasy, children’s and science fiction literature, movies, and television. I really appreciated that the book is a collection of essays in which writers and cartographers reflect on the maps of imaginary places that featured in their works and the maps, real or imagined, that inspired their creations.

That really gives the essays a personal feeling, and you get to know a little about the creation of maps like the Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter franchise or the various maps of Middle Earth featured in The Hobbit series. I like that the essays are conversational, and with over 200 illustrations, I was anxious to turn to the next page.

By Huw Lewis-Jones (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Writer's Map as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It’s one of the first things we discover as children, reading and drawing: Maps have a unique power to transport us to distant lands on wondrous travels. Put a map at the start of a book, and we know an adventure is going to follow. Displaying this truth with beautiful full-color illustrations, The Writer’s Map is an atlas of the journeys that our most creative storytellers have made throughout their lives. This magnificent collection encompasses not only the maps that appear in their books but also the many maps that have inspired them, the sketches that they used while writing,…


Book cover of Why North is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From

Joshua Hagen Author Of Borders: A Very Short Introduction

From my list on maps and cartography.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have liked maps since childhood and remember them prompting all sorts of questions, like why was that city, mountain, or border there instead of someplace else, or I would imagine what it would be like to visit those places. I don’t feel like I can truly understand or make sense of a place until I can see it from above, so I spend too much time on Google Earth. I have especially valued how maps or other cartographic representations can help illuminate the connections and interdependencies between peoples and places, between society and nature, and ultimately help us understand our place in the world.

Joshua's book list on maps and cartography

Joshua Hagen Why did Joshua love this book?

I was drawn to this book because it explains a broad range of cartographic conventions straightforwardly. Unlike the other books on my list, this book is probably the most academic. Yet I was impressed by Ashworth’s ability to  engagingly and informatively discuss seemingly dry topics, like latitude and longitude, legends, scale, and map symbology. 

enjoyed the wide range of illustrations featuring a mixture of historical and contemporary maps, which helped me understand the longer-term pedigree of modern map conventions and their advantages and limitations.

By Mick Ashworth,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Why North is Up as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Many people have a love of maps. But what lies behind the process of map-making? How have cartographers through the centuries developed their craft and established a language of maps which helps them to better represent our world and users to understand it?

This book tells the story of how widely accepted mapping conventions originated and evolved - from map orientation, projections, typography and scale, to the use of colour, map symbols, ways of representing relief and the treatment of boundaries and place names. It charts the fascinating story of how conventions have changed in response to new technologies and…


Book cover of The Story of Maps

Toby Lester Author Of The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America

From my list on geographical ideas behind the age of discovery.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.

Toby's book list on geographical ideas behind the age of discovery

Toby Lester Why did Toby love this book?

You can certainly find more recent surveys of the history of cartography, but this accessible work, first published in 1949, still stands out as an engaging and enlightening survey of the territory. Lloyd Brown begins his story some 2000 years ago, in Alexandria, Egypt, with the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose geographical ideas came together in the work of Claudius Ptolemy, and he then goes on, in an enjoyable narrative style, to show how scholars and monks and merchants and sailors and scientists all contributed to the art of mapmaking. The first half of the book provides an excellent summary of the kinds of maps that thinkers and travelers would have been familiar with by the time the Age of Discovery got underway.

By Lloyd A. Brown,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Story of Maps as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"An important and scholarly work; bringing together much information available heretofore only in scattered sources … easily readable." — Gerald I. Alexander, F.R.G.S. Cartographer, Map Division, New York Public Library
Early map making was characterized by secrecy. Maps were precious documents, drawn by astrologers and travelers, worn out through use or purposely destroyed. Just as men first mapped the earth indirectly, via the sun and stars, so must the history of maps be approached circuitously, through chronicles, astronomy, Strabo and Ptolemy, seamanship, commerce, politics. From the first determination of latitude 2000 years ago through the dramatic unraveling of longitude 1700…


Book cover of Cartography in the Twentieth Century

Jeremy Black Author Of Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past

From my list on for people who love maps.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian fascinated with maps and geography, I have produced historical atlases on the world, Britain, war, cities, naval history, fortifications, and World War Two, as well as books on geopolitics and maps. I am an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and of Policy Exchange.

Jeremy's book list on for people who love maps

Jeremy Black Why did Jeremy love this book?

A blockbuster of a reference work, but also a vital tool for all those interested the history of maps and mapping. Part of a series that is at once majestic, handsome, and full of the detailed knowledge of scholarship.

By Mark Monmonier (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Cartography in the Twentieth Century as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For more than thirty years, the History of Cartography Project has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps. Volume 6, Cartography in the Twentieth Century, continues this tradition with a groundbreaking survey of the century just ended and a new full-color, encyclopedic format. The twentieth century is a pivotal period in map history. The transition from paper to digital formats led to previously unimaginable dynamic and interactive maps. Geographic information systems radically altered cartographic institutions and reduced the skill required to create maps. Satellite…


Book cover of Treasures from the Map Room: A Journey through the Bodleian Collections

Matt Duckham Author Of GIS: A Computing Perspective

From my list on maps and mapmaking.

Why am I passionate about this?

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. 

Matt's book list on maps and mapmaking

Matt Duckham Why did Matt love this book?

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.  

By Debbie Hall (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Treasures from the Map Room as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of The History of Cartography, Volume 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance

Toby Lester Author Of The Fourth Part of the World: An Astonishing Epic of Global Discovery, Imperial Ambition, and the Birth of America

From my list on geographical ideas behind the age of discovery.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’m a writer and an editor with eclectic interests. I’ve published two books of popular history—Da Vinci's Ghost (2012), about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), about the map that gave America its name. I’ve also written extensively for national publications on such topics as the sociology of new religious movements, privacy protection in the Internet age, the Voynich manuscript, the revisionist study of the Qur’an, the revival of ancient Greek music, and alphabet reform in Azerbaijan. I’m presently a senior editor at the Harvard Business Review and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. From 1988-1990, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Yemen.

Toby's book list on geographical ideas behind the age of discovery

Toby Lester Why did Toby love this book?

You won’t be curling up in bed with this two-volume, 2,272-page encyclopedic history of cartography in the European Renaissance—but if you’ve got a passion for maps, or if you want the most comprehensive source of information on the cartography of the period, it’s a delightful and even essential work to consult. The essays are diverse and deeply informative, and the reproductions, including 80 gorgeous color plates, are a treat to spend time with.

By David Woodward,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The History of Cartography, Volume 3 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When the University of Chicago Press launched the land-mark "History of Cartography" series nearly thirty years ago, founding editors J. B. Harley and David Woodward hoped to create a new basis for map history. They did not, however, anticipate the larger renaissance in map studies that the series would inspire. But as the renown of the series and the comprehensiveness and acuity of the present two-part volume demonstrate, the history of cartography has proven to be unexpectedly fertile ground. "Cartography in the European Renaissance" treats the period from 1450 to 1650, long considered the most important in the history of…


Book cover of Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843

Pamela K. Gilbert Author Of Mapping the Victorian Social Body

From my list on how epidemics relate to bigger narratives.

Why am I passionate about this?

I began college as a science major, but then switched to literature from a minor to my major. In graduate school, as I worked on my dissertation (which became my first book), I found that metaphors of the body and health were everywhere in the literary field in the mid-nineteenth century. Suffice it to say that the sciences, including the rapid development of modern medicine, are both fundamental to this period and deeply shape its literary culture. In Mapping the Victorian Social Body, I became fascinated with the history of data visualization. Disease mapping completely transformed the ways we understand space and how our bodies exist within it.

Pamela's book list on how epidemics relate to bigger narratives

Pamela K. Gilbert Why did Pamela love this book?

A wonderful book on how techniques of mapping were central to the construction of both the empire and of an emerging idea of “India” as a coherent space. I love the way it clearly lays out how mapping is never simply an innocent process of measuring or describing something that exists out in the world, but is always a process of constructing that reality. And it is an essential part of the history of India, as well as the British empire. 

By Matthew H. Edney,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mapping an Empire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this history of the British surveys of India, focusing especially on the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) undertaken by the British East India Company, the author relates how imperial Britain employed modern scientific survey techniques not only to create and define the spacial inmage of its Indian empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities as triumphs of liberal, rational science bringing "Civilisation" to irrational, mystical and despotic Indians. The reshaping of cartographic technologies in Europe into their modern form played a key role in the use of the GTS as an instrument of British cartographic control over India. In…


Book cover of The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History

Roberto Casati Author Of The Cognitive Life of Maps

From my list on navigating the age of maps.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have obsessed with maps my whole life, but I guess the main drive for studying them is my enjoyment of outdoor spaces, as a hiker, a mountaineer, and as a sailor: always with a paper map at hand. If you use GPS (a wonderful innovation) you will not only lose some of your precious orientation abilities but above all you will look less at the environment around you. I feel that paper maps do a great favor to my brain and to my enjoyment of places. The books below are a great tribute to maps; they helped me understand them better, and this affected the way I use them.

Roberto's book list on navigating the age of maps

Roberto Casati Why did Roberto love this book?

This is a super-authoritative book on the historical evolution of map-making by a renowned scholar of classics. It shows a surprising variety of maps from Antiquity to the present. Yet in this variety, Jacob is able to find important commonalities that help us understand what makes a map a map.

The take-home message for me has been that maps are engines of thought. By making a territory visible, they unleash a trove of otherwise unthinkable thoughts about it. 

By Christian Jacob, Tom Conley (translator), Edward H. Dahl (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Sovereign Map as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A novel work in the history of cartography, "The Sovereign Map" argues that maps are as much about thinking as seeing, as much about the art of persuasion as the science of geography. As a classicist, Christian Jacob brings a fresh eye to his subject - which includes maps from Greek Antiquity to the twentieth century - and provides a theoretical approach to investigating the power of maps to inform, persuade, and inspire the imagination. Beginning with a historical overview of maps and their creation - from those traced in the dirt by primitive hands to the monumental Dutch atlases…


Book cover of Atlas of the Invisible: Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World
Book cover of All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey
Book cover of The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

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