The Map Book

Beautiful new coffee-table book connects the development of maps to historical cirucmstances We’ve recently noted what we hope is a trend toward truly deep and thoughtful books on cartography for the massesâ€“books that not only make an inventory of historically important or notable maps but also that attempt to connect them, with enlightened and witty commentary, into the history of its time. (…)

Beautiful new coffee-table book connects the development of maps to historical cirucmstances

We’ve recently noted what we hope is a trend toward truly deep and thoughtful books on cartography for the massesâ€“books that not only make an inventory of historically important or notable maps but also that attempt to connect them, with enlightened and witty commentary, into the history of its time. One such recent book is 100 Maps, which we mentioned in this posting here.

Another lovely and important book has recently been released, published by Levenger Press/Walker & Company, simply and aptly titled The Map Book. Unlike 100 Maps, it doesn’t satisfy itself with merely coming up with 100 notable examples, as admirable as that goal is, but gives the reader 175 beautiful, gorgeously-photographed examples of notable maps both well known and obscure, arranged along a timeline from the earliest town plan (a Babylonian clay fragment depicting about 1/4 of the city of Nippur) dated at 1500 B.C. to a satellite-sourced images of Mount Saint Helens generated after the resumption of volcanic activity in March of 2005. Each spread mentions a specific year on the left with the referenced picture on the right (there are some overleafs, such as the WaldseemÃ¼ller map, which deserves such coverage.

Along the way the high points are hit (T-O, Ptolemy, WaldseemÃ¼ller, Peters, et. al.) and the significant things that maybe should be well known but aren’t. For instance, a map dated 1718 of “Mad Margaret Bonnel’s Land” gridded and ruled seemingly almost to the square yard, the world according ot the Jains of 1750, and an 1890 cycling map of the area surrounding London. There’s a photo of the largest atlas in the world (dated 1660, the Klencke Atlas, taller than the average man) as well as the smallest (a 12-plate Atlast of the British Empire created for a doll’s house mad in honor of Queen Mary in 1920 and ironically housed in the same building)

It’s the Context

The book’s value is completed by the way the editor and authors endeavored to weave each map into its historical setting. The small atlas mentioned above, for instance, is illustrated in light of the middle-class morÃ©s of the time in England. The great atlas is given a backdrop of the atmosphere or royalty and grandeur of its time, and one gets the impression that the one may have naturally precipitated of the other. A 1670 map of Virgina and Maryland is described with respect to its drafter, the owner (Lord Baltimore), the influences of the drafter’s (Bohemia) and the map’s function (defining and clarifying Baltimore’s rights against the State of Maryland). The rationale is used unrelentingly thoroughout the book, to the reader’s benefit.

Punctuating the timeline are four essays (”Bread and Circuses”, “Maps, Mankind and Morality”, “Maps, Mammon and Monarchs”, and “Maps and Design”) that provide additional temporal thematic anchors.

For all the towering scholarship it’s written in a readable, entertaining style. Accessable, entertaining, and educational.

For the Enthusiast and the Curious Alike

The book is a collaboration of several authors and edited by Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections of the British Library. It is a sensitively designed volume aiming to support the subject matter with easily locatable and readable pages. As a whole it is a volume with interest for the merely interested as well as fanatical map pursuer, and worthwhile on any household shelf.

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