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On the Map.
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I am not very good at making things. I am good enough to appreciate the craftsmanship of those much better than me. I am more of an ideas person, perhaps why I ended up with a PhD in Philosophy of Science. But I have always held a secret admiration—with a tinge of envy—for people who are makers. As I went deeper into my career as a philosopher of science, I became aware that the material/making aspect of science—and technology—was largely ignored by ideas-obsessed philosophers. So, this is where I focused my attention, and I’ve loved vicariously being able to be part of making the world.
I loved how this book reads like a thriller—a David and Goliath thriller—in which a lowly clockmaker competed against the foremost scientists of his era and won—and even after he had won, he had to fight dastardly efforts by the elites of his day to deprive him of his prize and hard-earned fame.
The book spoke to my fascination with how things get made and why craftsmanship is important. But it also spoke to my concern with class and how those in power can rig things to their benefit, with, in this case, the happy result that good triumphed over evil.
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…
I still remember the day I discovered the family atlas (I must have about five; it then lived in my room, and my dad was probably irked, but too kind and encouraging to show it). Since then, I have been mesmerized by maps. How lucky I am to turn an early passion into a focus of research and teaching (I am a Classicist and Historian of Ancient Science). My publications include studies of narrative maps in Greco-Roman literature (they too were mesmerized by maps). You can find maps in the most unexpected places!
Never intended simply as a vehicle for giving directions from one place to the next, maps are translations of the topographical world. And translation is an act of interpretation.
That is one of the many things I like about this book: Monmonier looks at maps from different angles to explain the tricks that modern mapmakers have in their toolkits to distort data (this is nothing new; two thousand years ago Ptolemy fretted over the distortion caused by projecting a three-dimensional space, the spherical earth, on a two-dimensional surface).
How do maps lie? Scale, symbols in the key, distracting colors, selective data. What is the map’s purpose? Is it an advertisement or political propaganda? Is the map deliberately vague, inaccurate, or even just out of date?
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…
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.
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,…
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.
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…
I am a writer and editor with a background in art history, based in Berlin. My work has always been shaped by two complementary needs. First, I always felt a thirst for understanding and knowledge. Second, I was always on the hunt for brilliant design and beautiful visuals. Infographics were thus a natural terrain for me. Since 2012, I have published four comprehensive books in the field. This includes both surveys of contemporary work as well as studies in the history of the field.
Maps are the most ancient type of infographic we know, and that comes as no surprise. Spatial navigation is one of the most important evolutionary skills that both animals and humans have developed. Recording this knowledge in maps requires both a thorough scientific understanding and considerable artistic skills. This beautiful coffee table book is a mind-blowing and timeless trip through the field of cartography. It charts the development from pre-historic maps carved in stone all the way to recent brain scans from the Human Connectome Project. Give me this book and I’ll be lost browsing through its visual treasures for several days.
300 stunning maps from all periods and from all around the world, exploring and revealing what maps tell us about history and ourselves.
Map: Exploring the World brings together more than 300 fascinating maps from the birth of cartography to cutting-edge digital maps of the twenty-fist century. The book's unique arrangement, with the maps organized in complimentary or contrasting pairs, reveals how the history of our attempts to make flat representations of the world has been full of beauty, ingenuity and innovation.
Selected by an international panel of curators, academics and collectors, the maps reflect the many reasons people make…
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.
The discovery of hitherto unknown maps is a great treat and this edition uses one to show the development of urban mapping. Well-anchored in the locality, this book is also of much wider value.
This major re-examination of the history of map-making in Exeter, the historic county town of Devon, follows from the recent discovery of a 'new' Georgian town map of the city. That map, by William Birchynshaw (a man not known tohave produced any other), is reproduced in facsimile, along with nearly two dozen other maps from 1587 through to 1949. They are prefaced by an introduction which places the new discovery within the context of four centuries of map-making, demonstrating how Birchynshaw owed a debt both to John Hooker's map of 1587 and to that by Ichabod Fairlove of 1709; and…
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.
Wide-ranging, high-production values, a good balance of maps and text, and excellent value for money. Includes many different types of map not least those of fantasy worlds.
The British Library's map collection is the national cartographic collection of Britain and numbers around four million maps dating from 15 CE to 2017 CE. These include road maps drawn for 13th century pilgrims and sea charts for 17th-century pirates. They include the first printed map to show the Americas and the last to show English-controlled Calais. They include the world's biggest and smallest atlases. They include maps for kings and queens, popes, ministers, schoolchildren, soldiers, tourists. There are maps which changed the world. As well as comprehensively showcasing the varied and surprising treasures of the British Library's "banquet of…
Growing up, I rewatched Star Wars until I wore out my VHS tape. I read every Dragonlancenovel. I played a bit of D&D. When I got to college, I finally was allowed work on things that interested me. I found Art History, dove into Medieval Studies, and, in grad school, got serious about monsters. Monster Studies didn’t exist, but books were out (especially by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), and my advisor encouraged me to follow my passions. My 15-year-old self would be astonished to learn that I’d get to read monster books, study monster art, and watch monster movies as a job!
This is a brilliant, wide-ranging, deeply-sourced study of the dynamics that underpinned and justified early modern colonization of the Americas. Mandeville’sBook of Marvels and Travels is the prehistory of the horrors of colonization; the sources at the heart of Davies’s study are colonization’s architecture: maps, book illustrations, freestanding prints, published texts, letters, journals, and on. With nuance and care, Davies rewrites the intellectual history of this period, confronting the dehumanizing, demonizing, monsterizing visual and textual rhetoric of colonial enterprises (which directly contributed to large-scale violence), but also looking carefully at nuances, differences, and shifts in this rhetoric over the course of the Renaissance.
Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could - or should - be converted or enslaved, maps…
I'm a writer and poet who loved reading books set in fantasy worlds like Narnia as a child. When I began writing for children, I realised my own magical experiences had been on family trips to India, where goddesses and temples, palaces swarming with monkeys, ice-capped mountains, and elephant rides were part of everyday life. The term ‘magic realism’ seemed to better fit my own fantasy world, Indica. Here, elemental magic is rooted in the myths and culture of young hero Minou Moonshine, expanding her experiences and guiding the search for her destiny. The children’s books I've chosen also contain supernatural and magical elements which are intrinsic to the protagonist’s world – no wardrobe needed!
It's hard to believe that Kiran Millwood Hargrave’sThe Girl of Ink and Starsonly came out in 2016.
The book has become a modern classic, combining beautifully poetic writing with the compelling first-person voice of Isabella, the mapmaker’s daughter. When Isabella ventures into the mysterious interior of the island of Joya Governor, to search for her friend, the Governor’s daughter, she must navigate a mysterious labyrinth, supernatural demon dogs, and a volcano-dwelling deity.
The magic elements here are inspired by the indigenous culture of the Canary Isles.
I still remember the day I discovered the family atlas (I must have about five; it then lived in my room, and my dad was probably irked, but too kind and encouraging to show it). Since then, I have been mesmerized by maps. How lucky I am to turn an early passion into a focus of research and teaching (I am a Classicist and Historian of Ancient Science). My publications include studies of narrative maps in Greco-Roman literature (they too were mesmerized by maps). You can find maps in the most unexpected places!
In this beautiful book, Maier guides her readers through the parallel development of Rome (imperial city, Holy See, thriving center of art and intellectualism) with the evolution of mapmaking.
I like the clear way that she shows how the changing city helped inform transitions in how and why maps are made. For example, medieval maps of Rome forefront of the city’s five churches, while downplaying other features, and give the cloistered monk (and modern reader) the opportunity to trace an imagined pilgrimage (I spent many childhood hours with the family atlas imagining my own journeys to faraway lands).
Only in the 19th century, when travel for pleasure becomes widespread, do maps of Rome (and elsewhere), advertising their sponsors, become more utilitarian, enabling tourists to find their own ways, and supplying cheap souvenirs.
One of the most visited places in the world, Rome attracts millions of tourists each year to walk its storied streets and see famous sites like the Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Trevi Fountain. Yet this ancient city's allure is due as much to its rich, unbroken history as to its extraordinary array of landmarks. Countless incarnations and eras merge in the Roman cityscape. With a history spanning nearly three millennia, no other place can quite match the resilience and reinventions of the aptly nicknamed Eternal City. In this unique and visually engaging book, Jessica Maier considers Rome through…
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