Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline 1st Edition

by Anthony Grafton (Author), Daniel Rosenberg (Author)

16 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1568987637

ISBN-10: 1568987633

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What does history look like? How do you draw time?

From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now.

Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by theirgeographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press; 1 edition (March 3, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1568987633
ISBN-13: 978-1568987637
Product Dimensions: 9 x 1 x 10.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #848,874 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #778 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Historiography
- #1258 in Books > Arts & Photography > Architecture > Drafting & Presentation
- #1877 in Books > Arts & Photography > Architecture > History

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Customer Reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars

5 star		56%
4 star		19%
3 star		13%
2 star		6%
1 star		6%

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

114 of 120 people found the following review helpful

Warning: most illustrations are not in focus

By N. Hyland on July 4, 2011

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

It is with much regret that I must report that an otherwise excellent book has a major production flaw.
As far as I can tell, it appears that the author's provided scanned images of many ancient documents to the designer at Princeton Architectural Press. The layout and type is all excellent. But, it looks like the majority of images were not properly sharpened in Photoshop (a standard procedure when using scanned images) before being imported into InDesign (or possibly QuarkXPress) for the production of the book. There are a few images that are sharp. They appear to be taken with a digital camera or are more modern timelines converted directly from EPS vector files for the layout. In one example you can see the original scan, fuzzy, and next to it a sharpened close up of a part of the very same image.
If it is not a problem with the designer doing sharpening of images, than it is some kind of problem with the printer overseas either using the wrong image data or un-sharpening the images in some way.
It does not appear to be a screen alignment issue or something physically done wrong in printing. (Although, on a few signatures, the text is foggy but I think that is the ink thinning out - a consequence, perhaps, of Princeton Architectural Press saving money by going to overseas for printing.)
Why do sharp illustrations matter in this book? Because it is all about very detailed graphs. It is nearly useless because one cannot make out any of the details in the images printed in the book.
Really a shame that this disaster happened. The designer and the editor should have caught this in the proofs and corrected it before publication.Read more ›

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

Brilliant topic utterly ruined by too-small images

By Dr Garry on November 17, 2013

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

I have to agree with the reviewer J. Coates. This book should be a five star just for the originality of the subject matter, and the author's excellent coverage. But the publisher has defeated the author's intention, which is to display the rich history of timelines.

I will give you just one example from many. On page 143, the book shows two images from Auguste Comte's Positivist calendar from 1849. Each of these images is about 80mm by 40mm: about one-tenth the size of the original, as far as I can tell. Unless you are using the Large Hadron Collider to get a better view, the images provide only the vaguest of approximations.

There is no point in buying this book if you are over the age of 40: your eyes simply will not be able to cope without a magnifying glass and a Maglite for illumination. The font size of the body text is somewhere between eensy-weensy and really eensy-weensy, and the font size used for captions makes a 6-point font look like banner headlines.

I don't know if the publisher shafted the author, or if the author colluded in this massacre of his own vision. One day a better publisher will reprint the work in a much larger format, and then we shall have a truly great work to read.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

A great and important book, giving the history of timelines, graphical representations of history

By Gene Rhea Tucker on January 8, 2014

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

A great and important book, giving the history of timelines, graphical representations of history. This is epitomized by their inspired choice of title: "CARTOGRAPHIES of Time," i.e. presenting timelines as a temporal-map, an adjunct to the more familiar spatial-map. They cover nearly everything, beginning with simple tables, to graphical tables, to proper timelines, in numerous forms, to artistic and computer representations of time. It is a great effort. The authors cite everything admirably, describe ideas and images perfectly, and seem to cover almost every facet of timeline in a lucid and thorough manner. The section on the timelines of the nineteenth century, the heyday, the golden age, of antiquarianism (so often a slur, unfortunately, for historians today), is brilliant and intriguing.

The only problems I can say are these. One is physical. This book should be twice its (10.7 x 8.7 x 1.1 inches) size. Some images are large enough and clear enough to show minute detail; many, far too many, are too small and blurry. You can get the gist of these images, but it is disappointing to find so many grand timelines that are too small to read. You will need a powerful magnifying glass to fully enjoy this book. The second problem is that the historical atlas is virtually ignored. True, maps are intertwined and integral to many of the timelines, but the maps that show chronological time are absent. True, this subject is covered elsewhere (in the unfortunately horribly boring "Maps and History" by Jeremy Black), but it should be addressed - these are indeed other ways of representing time, and the very epitome of "Cartographies of Time."

All in all though, this book is a MUST for all historians, for all map lovers, and for all theological scholars interested in the representation of church history, biblical chronology, and biblical prophecy. And it is a fine, medium-paced read.

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58 of 61 people found the following review helpful

A History of Histories Flowing on the Page

By Rob Hardy HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWER on June 9, 2010

Format: Hardcover

"While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored." So starts an impressive illustrated book _Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline_ (Princeton Architectural Press) by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. The reason the timeline is ignored is that it seems so obvious - plot historic trends on a line, the earlier ones on one end leading to later ones on the other. It is such a simple idea that it is a surprise that we didn't know about it as soon as we started putting marks on paper. Yet there is a history of the development of such lines, and it is fascinating how the lines caught on once people started charting history on paper. That such graphic histories are useful seems obvious; they have the potential for giving visual form to historical flow, and for showing connections of one trend to another. There are plenty of serious charts of time shown here that conscientiously do just that. There are other charts, just as serious, that have been designed to show, for instance, how Jesus is going to return in 1843, and there are idiosyncratic charts by Dadaists which show not much of anything but in a highly complex fashion. The book is most entertaining when it looks at these oddities, but there is nothing like it to show our progress at taking graphic time seriously.

The antecedent of the timeline was probably the lists and tables giving a chronology of rulers and important events. Family trees lent themselves to chronological display, although many of the ones here are so complicated that it is hard to see the years ticking by.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Three Stars

I was disappointed by the small size of the illustrations which make them impossible to read and appreciate.

Published 5 days ago by Kathy Moore

Five Stars

Fantastic tome.

Published 2 months ago by Anni Lampert

Five Stars

A very inspiring set of timelines examples looking at ways in which Time and History has been represented visually.

Published 4 months ago by Lara Baladi

Four Stars

A beautiful book. Yes, the illustrations are small and often highly reduced, but just use a magnifying glass.

Published 5 months ago by DAJohnson

Four Stars

Really good book for the coffee table.

Published 7 months ago by Ian I.

The pictures, they're too d*amn small!

Fascinating book, and essential for anyone working with the visualization of time-conditioned variables. Read more

Published 16 months ago by John(Amplify) Stewart

A treasure.

If you care about Books - the real, physical objects you can hold in your hands, add to your library and leave to your kids, this is one to splurge on (it's expensive). Read more

Published 17 months ago by Mark Mosca

Essential for Qualitative Studies

Knowledge, thruth, reasons and causes, reality and power of the past: all is there is the book and now. Read more

Published 23 months ago by Murtazali Dibirov

Beautiful book flawed by inadequate trim size

This is a beautiful book with an incredible wealth of fascinating timelines illustrated. Unfortunately, the book is fatally compromised by the publisher's business requirement to... Read more

Published on December 9, 2011 by W. Frederick Zimmerman

GORGEOUS!

Well I felt quite guilty ordering this book, it seemed so.... frivolous or something during this recession. Read more

Published on February 12, 2011 by KarenSantaFe