A collection of 100 Minimalist Maps by Peter Gorman

More than just colorful clickbait or pragmatic city grids, maps are often deeply emotional tales: of political projects gone wrong, budding relationships that failed, and countries that vanished. In Map Men, Steven Seegel takes us through some of these historical dramas with a detailed look at the maps that made and unmade the world of East Central Europe through a long continuum of world war and revolution. As a collective biography of five prominent geographers between 1870 and 1950—Albrecht Penck, Eugeniusz Romer, Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, Isaiah Bowman, and Count Pál Teleki—Map Men reexamines the deep emotions, textures of friendship, and multigenerational sagas behind these influential maps. Taking us deep into cartographical archives, Seegel re-creates the public and private worlds of these five mapmakers, who interacted with and influenced one another even as they played key roles in defining and redefining borders, territories, nations—and, ultimately, the interconnection of the world through two world wars. Throughout, he examines the transnational nature of these processes and addresses weighty questions about the causes and consequences of the world wars, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and the reasons East Central Europe became the fault line of these world-changing developments. At a time when East Central Europe has surged back into geopolitical consciousness, Map Men offers a timely and important look at the historical origins of how the region was defined—and the key people who helped define it.

The story of an infamous crime, a revered map dealer with an unsavory secret, and the ruthless subculture that consumed him Maps have long exerted a special fascination on viewers—both as beautiful works of art and as practical tools to navigate the world. But to those who collect them, the map trade can be a cutthroat business, inhabited by quirky and sometimes disreputable characters in search of a finite number of extremely rare objects. Once considered a respectable antiquarian map dealer, E. Forbes Smiley spent years doubling as a map thief —until he was finally arrested slipping maps out of books in the Yale University library. The Map Thief delves into the untold history of this fascinating high-stakes criminal and the inside story of the industry that consumed him. Acclaimed reporter Michael Blanding has interviewed all the key players in this stranger-than-fiction story, and shares the fascinating histories of maps that charted the New World, and how they went from being practical instruments to quirky heirlooms to highly coveted objects. Though pieces of the map theft story have been written before, Blanding is the first reporter to explore the story in full—and had the rare privilege of having access to Smiley himself after he’d gone silent in the wake of his crimes. Moreover, although Smiley swears he has admitted to all of the maps he stole, libraries claim he stole hundreds more—and offer intriguing clues to prove it. Now, through a series of exclusive interviews with Smiley and other key individuals, Blanding teases out an astonishing tale of destruction and redemption. The Map Thief interweaves Smiley’s escapades with the stories of the explorers and mapmakers he knew better than anyone. Tracking a series of thefts as brazen as the art heists in Provenance and a subculture as obsessive as the oenophiles in The Billionaire’s Vinegar, Blanding has pieced together an unforgettable story of high-stakes crime.

This book traces the history of mapmaking while offering insight into the role of cartography in human civilization and sharing anecdotes about the cultural arenas frequented by map enthusiasts. It comes as no surprise that, as a kid, Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings slept with a bulky Hammond world atlas by his pillow every night. It recounts his lifelong love affair with geography and explores why maps have always been so fascinating to him and to fellow enthusiasts everywhere. He takes readers on a world tour of geogeeks, from the London Map Fair to the computer programmers at Google Earth. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of map culture: highpointing, geocaching, road atlas rallying, even the "unreal estate" charted on the maps of fiction and fantasy. He also considers the ways in which cartography has shaped our history, suggesting that the impulse to make and read maps is as relevant today as it has ever been.

Ancient Perspectives encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. Ancient Perspectives presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy’s ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor’s rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, one chapter seeks to uncover how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this absorbing volume reinterprets and compares.

Over the past four decades, the volumes published in the landmark History of Cartography series have both chronicled and encouraged scholarship about maps and mapping practices across time and space. As the current director of the project that has produced these volumes, Matthew H. Edney has a unique vantage point for understanding what “cartography” has come to mean and include. In this book Edney disavows the term cartography, rejecting the notion that maps represent an undifferentiated category of objects for study. Rather than treating maps as a single, unified group, he argues, scholars need to take a processual approach that examines specific types of maps—sea charts versus thematic maps, for example—in the context of the unique circumstances of their production, circulation, and consumption. To illuminate this bold argument, Edney chronicles precisely how the ideal of cartography that has developed in the West since 1800 has gone astray. By exposing the flaws in this ideal, his book challenges everyone who studies maps and mapping practices to reexamine their approach to the topic. The study of cartography will never be the same.

The concept of mental maps is used in several disciplines including geography, psychology, history, linguistics, economics, anthropology, political science, and computer game design. However, until now, there has been little communication between these disciplines and methodological schools involved in mental mapping. Mental Maps: Geographical and Historical Perspectives addresses this situation by bringing together scholars from some of the related fields. Ute Schneider examines the development of German geographer Heinrich Schiffers’ mental maps, using his books on Africa from the 1930s to the 1970s. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Chloé Yvroux investigate conceptions of Israel and Palestine, particularly the West Bank, held by French and Israeli students. By superimposing large numbers of sketch maps, Clarisse Didelon-Loiseau, Sophie de Ruffray, and Nicolas Lambert identify "soft" and "hard" macro-regions on the mental maps of geography students across the world. Janne Holmén investigates whether the Baltic and the Mediterranean Seas are seen as links or divisions between the countries that line their shores, according to the mental maps of high school seniors. Similarly, Dario Musolino maps regional preferences of Italian entrepreneurs. Finally, Lars-Erik Edlund offers an essayistic account of mental mapping, based on memories of maps in his own family. This edited volume book uses printed maps, survey data and hand drawn maps as sources, contributing to the study of human perception of space from the perspectives of different disciplines. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

A map is a snapshot of a place, a city, a nation or even the world at a given point in time - fascinating for what they tell us about the way our ancestors saw themselves, their neighbours and their place in the world. This magnificent collection, drawn from seven centuries of maps held in the National Archives at Kew, looks at a variety of maps, from those found in 14th Century manuscripts, through early estate maps, to sea charts, maps used in military campaigns, and maps from treaties. The text explores who the mapmakers were, the purposes for which the maps were made, and what it tells us about the politics of the time. Great images are accompanied by compelling stories. Featured is a woodcut map of 16th Century London, a map of where the bombs fell during the Second World War, and a map the first American settlers' drew when they were attempting to establish a new empire on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now North Carolina. Richly illustrated with large scale reproductions of the maps, the book also includes some of the more amusing or esoteric maps from the National Archives, such as the map of the Great Exhibition in 1851 that was presented on a lady's glove, a London Underground map in the form of a cucumber, and a Treasure Island map used to advertise National Savings. This is a fascinating and unusual journey through the world of maps and mapmakers.

A city threatened by an ancient plague. A love across borders. A desperate choice that could break their worlds apart forever. When a fragment of a deadly map is recovered from a medieval plague pit in London, the Mapwalker team must cross over into the Borderlands once more. In a race against time, they must find the remaining pieces of the map in a journey across long-lost cities before the Shadow Cartographers wield it against Earthside in a devastating attack. Can Sienna resist the call of the Shadow as she struggles to save her home? Will Finn take a risk on love across borders or leave the Earthsiders to their fate? Map of Plagues is book 2 of the Mapwalker fantasy series. The Mapwalker Fantasy Adventure series: Map of Shadows #1 Map of Plagues #2 Map of the Impossible #3

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design. The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field: more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs critical introductions by experienced experts in the field focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’ fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research