Earlier this year, we took a trip out of state, and it was the first time we had never used a paper map on such a trip. We had paper as back-up, but we were using, of course, a map program on the smartphone. Paper maps have been around almost as long as there has been paper, and the electronic version we used really wasn’t much different from looking at a printed map. Maps mean roadmaps for lots of us, but that is far too limited an understanding, especially if you look through _Map: Exploring the World_ (Phaidon). It is a large-format, colorful, and heavy collection of over three hundred maps of wildly varying subjects and styles. In an introduction, John Hessler, a map specialist at the Library of Congress, quotes a definition of maps given by the historian of cartography Brian Harley: “Graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world.” Roadmaps fit that definition, and plenty are included here, but what a wealth of other ideas is here on display.
What maps leave out is a lesson here. Harry Beck’s classic 1933 map of the London Underground is here, in all its revolutionary orthogonal and diagonal clarity. Maps do not have to be of real territories. A map here will be familiar to everyone who has read the Pooh stories, that of the Hundred Acre Wood. There is Robert Louis Stevenson’s map of Treasure Island, too. What shape a map should take is an issue shown on many of these pages, because flat maps inevitably distort the globe. The Dymaxion Airocean World Map of 1954 by R. Buckminster Fuller solves the problem a different way, with the globe projected upon a regular polygon of twenty triangular sides. When cut apart and unfolded, the triangles can be arranged flat to show the land masses with relatively little distortion and forming an almost continuous island; arranged another way, the seas are all linked. There is no right way up to the map and no preferred center; it was Fuller’s depiction of “Spaceship Earth” and meant to emphasize that we are all in this together and must consider our common future. There are beautiful maps of constellations and of the Moon here, as well as a map of connectivity within the human brain. There are maps that are meant to be funny, with countries shaped like people or animals to make a point like a political cartoon. There are plenty of propaganda maps. There is a map that has the southern regions at the top and northern at the bottom; there is, after all, nothing inherently “up” about our usual northerly map orientation. There’s a chart that showed where and when whales were to have been profitably hunted, and the chart itself may have been a tool in their decimation. There’s the famous chart that showed how a particular pump, rather than some vague miasma, was causing cholera in nineteenth-century London. There is a lattice of sticks assembled by Marshall Islanders that incomprehensibly served as a chart for the seas between the islands. There is a garish map of Liverpool used by German pilots in World War II, the colors chosen so the map would be clear in the red or amber lighting the pilots used so as not to decrease their night vision. The diversity of maps is astonishing.
There is but one problem with this presentation. Many of the maps shown here were big objects, and although the book has big pages and the reproductions can often get the point across, sometimes they do not do the originals justice. There is a very funny “Wonderground Map of London Town” by Donald Gill from 1914 which shows an exuberant cartoon rendering of buildings and people all jammed together. Like all the maps here, it gets its page, but it is a mere colorful jumble at this scale; I was very glad to find copies of it online which I could look at in detail. Nonetheless, _Map_ introduced it to me, and I am grateful, and also grateful for the other superb visual ideas presented in this gorgeous book. Look and think.
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From the Publisher
A visually engaging, thematic survey of maps, unlike most other books which are limited to historical examples or geographical maps only
A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America, 1939, Daniel K. Wallingford
Printed paper, 30 x 41 cm / 12 x 16 in., private collection.
Photo Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection
Mapping the Brain, 2014, Human Connectome Project
Digital, dimensions variable
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Consortium of the Human Connectome Project
Hurricane Katrina Flooding Estimated Depths and Extent, 2005, NOAA/FEMA
Colour-coded satellite image, dimensions variable
Photo Credit: NOAA Central Library Historical Collection/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
Over 250 maps featured, sequenced thematically to allow for many revealing and stimulating juxtapositions, with a timeline of maps at the back to show the history of cartography
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Disappointing Reproductions
I was quite disappointed. The maps are not only so much reduced as to be mostly illegible, but the reproductions are mediocre, using a relatively coarse half-tone screen and less than vibrant colors. Why reviewers have not noted these limitations is a mystery. Phaidon could and should have done much better -- especially given the Introduction's claim that "this book puts the emphasis back on the experience of viewing rather than of describing. The accompanying photo shows an enlargement of a typical square inch of a reproduction. Compare, e.g., MoMA's *The Printed Picture* by Richard Benson (2008), whose illustrations are superbly reproduced (even viewed with a powerful loupe the screen is so fine as to be virtually undetectable) and with thumbnail enlargements of small sections in the case of reproductions that had to be much reduced.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2015
- Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2016
- Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2015
I was quite disappointed. The maps are not only so much reduced as to be mostly illegible, but the reproductions are mediocre, using a relatively coarse half-tone screen and less than vibrant colors. Why reviewers have not noted these limitations is a mystery. Phaidon could and should have done much better -- especially given the Introduction's claim that "this book puts the emphasis back on the experience of viewing rather than of describing. The accompanying photo shows an enlargement of a typical square inch of a reproduction.
Compare, e.g., MoMA's *The Printed Picture* by Richard Benson (2008), whose illustrations are superbly reproduced (even viewed with a powerful loupe the screen is so fine as to be virtually undetectable) and with thumbnail enlargements of small sections in the case of reproductions that had to be much reduced.
Images in this review
- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2017
Top reviews from other countries
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- Dave BookerReviewed in the United Kingdom on April 24, 2017
This book deserves five stars
