Customer Reviews

Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections

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About two months ago, I reviewed "Understanding Map Projections" by Melita Kennedy and Steve Kopp. While in certain minor ways this book falls short of Kennedy and Kopp's book, it is generally head and shoulders above it. And while it is true that Snyder's book is almost twice the price of Kennedy and Kopp's book, it is worth it. Other books of comparable value cost much more.

The only negative thing I really have to say about Snyder's book is that he tries to do two different things in it. This book is both a history and a survey of map projections, and what is appropriate for a history may not be best for a survey. In particular, it means that Snyder covers the various projections not in a sensible order (grouping similar types together), but chronologically. Projections popularized, say, in the 19th century are all covered in the same section.

I prefer the organization of Kennedy and Kopp's book, and I think the use of color in that book makes for a more attractive book. But my primary rating of a book on map projections is going to be based on three criteria: (1) Does it cover a large variety of different projections? (2) Does it give illustrations of what they look like? and (3) Does it give formulas or other information by which one can actually construct maps on the projections listed? This book ranks much higher than Kennedy and Kopp's on two of these three criteria (the first and last), and does not fall very far short of it on the remnaining one.

Over a hundred projections (actually, close to twice that many) are treated in this book, from familiar ones to novelty projections that never will be used in a serious atlas. And a large proportion of them are illustrated (though not all, and the ones that are do not use color as in the Kennedy & Kopp book) and either have the formulas for plotting them or are described in terms equivalent to giving formulas (By contrast the Kennedy-Kopp book has almost no formulas, and the descriptions do not allow you to produce them).

If you don't want to spend over $50, this is the one map projection book to buy.

True to its title, here is a fascinating and very readable historical survey of mankind's struggle to draw a spherical planet as a flat map in a useful way - a problem simply stated, yet never perfectly solvable.

Not many projection formulas, but plenty of illustrations, including timelines and original historic maps.

The huge bibliography only hints at the enourmous amount of research and cross-referencing provided by this work. From the viewpoint of map projections, this is *the* ultimate history book.

Excellent historical description of the different map projections used throughout history. This book describes the methods used during various periods of Western civilization. If you are looking for information on the development of map projections and how such things came to be this is a well researched and scholarly compendium of information. An interesting tour from classical times to the twentieth century. The material has been put in a form that makes it accessible to more than just the specialist. Anyone who has an interest in maps would do well in reading this work. The ingenuity of trying to project a globe on a flat surface is revealed here.

I have not yet completed reading this book, but I've skimmed through many parts and done a thorough reading of little bits of it. It has a solid -- if not particularly rich, in terms of details (if it did, the book would be thousands of pages long) -- history, along with many pictures of the projections (a bit austere: just the graticules and the outlines of the boundaries between water and land are shown, but then, that's all that's really needed). It has many useful mathematical formulas for translating latitude-longitude coordinates on the Earth into x-y coordinate on maps of various projections. If you're into map projections, here's where to start. (or, at least that's where I'm starting, and I have no complaints yet!)