Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet [Paperback]

Nicholas Crane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2004

“Crane’s book is quite probably destined to become the standard text.”—Simon Winchester, The New York Times

Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of the exploratory vortex were the cartographers who were painstakingly piecing together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them. His inspiration—the map—solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? His resulting projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview. For the first time, people were able to see the world on paper and their place in it.

Nicholas Crane, a geographer himself, has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce this masterly and highly acclaimed biography of the man who mapped the planet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the course of a life that nearly spanned the 16th century, that glorious age of exploration, a Flemish peasant's son, Gerard Mercator, helped shape the modern perception of the planet while seldom venturing beyond the confines of a corner of northwestern Europe. Crane (Clear Waters Rising), a British geographer and adventurer, makes much of Mercator's long life and uses this longevity as an organizing theme of the biography: "surviving for twice as long as many of his contemporaries, he was able to mature through two consecutive life spans." In the first half of his life, the comparatively impetuous Mercator, struggling with his ideals, was imprisoned under the inquisition. In the second, with his passions more focused, he conceived and drew the first modern map using a "projection" that solved certain navigational problems; eventually, he created the first unified compilation of maps of the world, called an atlas. The raw material here is rich: there's the story of a poor boy makes good, explorations into civil and martial turmoil, and the excitement of new discoveries. While Crane sometimes loses track of the main story amid the minutiae of shipping manifests, he does demonstrate a real talent for incorporating letters and documents from diverse sources into very readable prose, as well as teasing Mercator's personality out of sometimes scant or tangential sources.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Famous cartographer Gerhard Mercator was a fellow graduate of Erasmus' alma mater and absorbed the Renaissance humanist spirit of the 1500s. In his 86 years, Mercator saw the opening wars of the Reformation, courtesy of Charles V's and his son Phillip II's campaigns to restore Catholic power in the Spanish Netherlands. These two themes of Mercator's era, the rejuvenation of inquiry and religio-political war, frame Crane's quite detailed biography, the first in English about the geographer. One of its most surprising aspects is the cradle-to-grave abundance of information about Mercator that Crane has pulled together, which is especially surprising since lowly cobblers' sons--as Mercator was--usually leave no historical records. But relatives and teachers took to Mercator, and their confidence in the boy was eventually vindicated by his seminal cartographic achievements. Illustrations of them--his mentors and his maps--abound in this stolid volume of Mercator's techniques and turbulent times. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks (February 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080506625X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805066258
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #929,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mercator: a first class story, November 30, 2003

By 

David G. Sutliff (Park City, UT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (Hardcover)

Mercator, by Nicholas Crane, is a first class story about Mercator, his work and the troubled times. Mercator's methods of mapmaking were major breakthroughs in layout but it is hard to understand why that was the case, considering that we have maps everywhere today, even on demand in our cars. But Crane carefully lays out the background of discovery and politics and printing and art work that shows you why Mercator's work was so breathtakingly advanced at the time. A truly fine read.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mercator Was a Person, Not Just a Projection, March 23, 2003

By 

Lauren S. Kahn (McLean, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (Hardcover)

Who hasn't heard of "Mercator projection"? You see it every time you pick up an atlas and look at a world map with all its longitude and latitude lines.

Well, lo and behold, Mercator was a person, Gerardus Mercator, not just a projection.

This is a terrific book for anyone interested in history that goes beyond the ordinary. In fact, there have been a lot of books about scientific history and this is a worthy addition to the genre.

Mercator was born in poverty in the Low Countries and lived to become the preeminent geographer of his time when drawing an accurate map involved doing the best you could from limited resources. Starting with globes he created the conventional way of putting a map on a flat surface with minimal distortion.

This is not the easiest book to read, but it was excellent. I recommend it to anyone who wants to deal with history beyond the usual political history.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mapmaker to the World and to the Centuries, March 23, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (Hardcover)

Cartographers are generally an anonymous bunch. If you know one cartographer, it is probably Mercator, and you probably only know his last name because of his ingenious projection to make a flat map of our spheroid Earth. Gerard Mercator was a mild and modest man, less interested in making a name for himself than in improving knowledge of our planet. It was for others of his era within the bustling sixteenth century to cross the seas and bring back riches, and more importantly, geographical data. Mercator himself never even approached an ocean, his exploring restricted mostly to libraries and obscure reports from those who made the voyages. He never had a biography in English until Nicholas Crane produced _Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet_ (Henry Holt). The life of the cartographer is integrated with the tumultuous military, political, and meteorological events around him, for an engaging look at an original thinker.

Mercator was born as Gerard Kremer to poor parents (his father was a cobbler) in Flanders in 1512. He was fortunate in being helped in his education, and became an apprentice to a maker of instruments and globes. His engraving into copperplate was beautiful and influential. In 1537, Mercator published his first map, a portrait of the Holy Land. Four years later, he made his first terrestrial globe, and Crane makes understandable how huge such a project was. Making the lens-shaped map papers to glue onto the sphere may have inspired Mercator to calculate his projection, a map that was to be an aid to navigators ever after. Mercator lived in a tumultuous time, and his moderate views, shared with the humanists, about such things as faith in Christ being more important than ritualistic ceremony, were considered heretical by others. In 1544, he was actually imprisoned for seven months for alleged Lutheran sympathies (charged with "_lutherye_"). He remained busy until the end of his long life, during the final three decades of which he worked on a book of maps of lands all over the world which was only completed by his grandsons. There had been other such books, but Mercator's was more comprehensive. It was also more influential; he named it after a Titan of Roman mythology, and ever since, any book of maps has been called an atlas.

We are less surprised by maps than those in Mercator's time; we have instantaneous satellite pictures of the world, whenever we want them, and _terra incognita_ continues to dwindle. Everyone recognizes the true silhouettes of continents. There was a time when such knowledge was still new, and tentative. Crane has written about the many influences on his subject within this complicated historical period, and has produced a remarkably full portrait. Mercator assimilated information and made a new picture of the world, a picture now familiar to us all. His influence is not even confined to the Earth he served so well; when the Mariner missions mapped Mars, the resultant charts were Mercator projections.