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Book review

Charting our way through history

By DAVID WALTON
Published January 21, 2006

The Map Book, Edited by Peter Barber

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps," says Joseph Conrad's narrator Marlow, as he sets out for the Congo in Heart of Darkness. "At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there."

A passion for maps is the core and inspiration of Peter Barber's wondrous and endlessly ponderable The Map Book. This hefty anthology, arranged chronologically from 1500 B.C. to 2005, and compiled by the Head of Map Collections at the British Library, is a world to get lost in.

Many worlds to get lost in. For as Barber says, "for map enthusiasts the fascination of maps ironically stems from their necessary lack of truth." He dismisses lightly "the unwritten assumptions that the only aspect of map history worth studying was its mathematical precision."

Maps are projections, not just of a physical landscape but of our beliefs and mental perspective as well. Consider, for example, any highway map that ignores features of terrain and focuses exclusively on roadways, junctures and distances.

Barber's chronological format is easy to browse, fascinating when read in sequence. Each right-hand page is a full-color reproduction, usually one portion of a larger map. The left-hand page explains the map's history and significance, headed by a two-line synopsis, and down the left margin its year and a smaller color illustration, usually the full view of the map on a mosaic floor, a shield cover, a tapestry presented to Elizabeth I. Truly amazing are the many forms on which maps have been preserved over the centuries.

History's most familiar map image was the circle surrounding a T, stamped on many Roman coins, enduring into medieval times. The symbol represented a circle of ocean surrounding three continents, which were separated by three rivers. The downstroke of the T was the Mediterranean Sea separating Europe from Africa. The Don and the Nile made up the cross stroke that separated the two lower continents from Asia, the east, which filled the top half of the circle. This map orientation with the east at top persisted for centuries.

America, as everybody knows, was named for the wrong guy, for Amerigo Vespucci rather than for Christopher Columbus. In 1501-02 Vespucci sailed with Columbus along the coast of what was then thought to be Eastern Asia, but Vespucci guessed was a new, fourth continent.

Vespucci's book about his travels became a bestseller and attracted the attention of two German mapmakers, Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemuller. In their 1507 world map they showed a new continent separated from Asia by an ocean, the then-unknown Pacific. Following the tradition of naming continents after women, they feminized and named it "America."

The map was popular and influential and the name caught on, "and it is perhaps just," reflects Barber, "that the continent be named after the man who grasped its true nature rather than Columbus, who died convinced he had simply reached the East Indies."

Barber pays due homage to today's digital cartographic capabilities available to you, me and the kid next door. His example, a map of Detroit colored to represent income levels in different areas, shows, to nobody's surprise, that poorer people live nearest the airport and industry.

His closing selections favor those who preserve mapmaking's cockeyed tradition: a realistic island "Map of Utopia" (1998) by Japanese artist Satomi Matroba that digitally matches the topography of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima; and an eerie satellite-view, heat-measuring map, really a photograph, of an eruption of Mount St. Helens in March 2005.

A personal favorite is a 2002 map of London showing ground subsidence or uplift in millimeters, compiled from monthly satellite data over a 10-year span, "revealing subtle features over wide areas that only a time-traveling surveyor could achieve."

Something that only a map could tell you.

Reviewer David Walton is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh.

"The Map Book," edited by Peter Barber, Bloomsbury, $45, 360 pages.

[Last modified January 20, 2006, 08:59:03]