Cartographia is a magnificent, lavishly illustrated bound collection of more than two hundred maps from around the world and throughout time. The maps within chart all manner of terrain - symbolic, spiritual, political, and physical. Mainly through pictorial content but also through accompanying text, Cartographia explores the world, its history, and its culture via the map. Some of my favorites:
· A 1906 climatological map illustrating how rainfall in India determined a pattern of settlement that split the country into strong regional identities.
· An isometric map of Tokyo's Ginza district (c.1987) that uses multiple points of view to vividly evoke the viewer's sense of place.
· A Chinese map from 1329 in which North is located in the bottom right-hand corner and geographical information is expressed mathematically upon a grid.
· A fourth-century map that affords cartographic wanderer the ability to traverse the entire expanse of the Roman Empire at the time. This twenty-foot long papyrus scroll was the original road atlas, illustrating as it does some 70,000 miles of Roman roads from Britain to Sri Lanka. Of course the territory is misshapen, but distance is included in locally measured units (Roman miles, leagues in Gaul, parasangs in Persia...)
· An isometric map of Tokyo's Ginza district (c.1987) that uses multiple points of view to vividly evoke the viewer's sense of place.
· A Chinese map from 1329 in which North is located in the bottom right-hand corner and geographical information is expressed mathematically upon a grid.
· A fourth-century map that affords cartographic wanderer the ability to traverse the entire expanse of the Roman Empire at the time. This twenty-foot long papyrus scroll was the original road atlas, illustrating as it does some 70,000 miles of Roman roads from Britain to Sri Lanka. Of course the territory is misshapen, but distance is included in locally measured units (Roman miles, leagues in Gaul, parasangs in Persia...)
There are modern maps as well, such as the 2004 red-state/blue-state dichotomy map which illustrates the ability for cartographic information to be misused to distort the truth. The original red-state/blue-state map depicts the United States largely in red with a handful of blue staes around the fringes, largely in the Northeast and on the West Coast. It was used to convey a Republican landslide in the 2004 Presidential election. Next to this is a variation that depicts the voting broken down by county results, infusing shades of purple throughout the country. A third permutation not only shows the voting on a county level, but rescales each state according to its population, illustrating further that the actual voting results of the election were extremely close - far from the Republican landslide expressed in the original map.
There are entirely too many maps to go into here - a map of a Shaker village, a linguistic map of Africa, a map of World War I trenches in France and Belgium, a totemic landscape by an aboriginal Australian artist - from the ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt to our own modern world, Cartographia is gorgeous in its large format four-color presentation of these cartographic treasures and ambitious in its attempt to tell the stories of cultures around the world.
