On the Map: A Mind‐Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. By Simon Garfiled

ON THE MAP: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. By SIMON GARFIELD. 464 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. New York: Gotham Books, 2013. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 9781592407798. The British fascination with maps has a long tradition in geography. The latest title, On the Map, by popular journalist Simon Garfield, reviews the history of cartography in a relaxed narrative style consisting of short topical chapters for casual reading and serious insights. After a brief foreword by the American author Dava Sobel, Garfield sequences the book in chronological order from Greek and Roman cartograms to current Google and Facebook maps with intermediate essays on medieval, Renaissance, and modern examples of crucial cartography. The book is ordered in twenty-three chapters, with fifteen intermediate "Pocket Map" case studies. The result is a genteel gallery tour of cartographic classics set in the currency of Internet vocabulary and popular culture. The book opens with the example of current Facebook membership contacts, creating a visual web of global connections. Garfield notes that this is based on a classic Mercator projection, which underlies his theme that traditions in cartography are long lived and adaptable to modern technology. He contrasts his opening chapter with a brief review of Greek Ptolemaic geography, held in ancient knowledge, as the cartographic standard until the Renaissance explorations. With the collapse of classical knowledge, Garfield next offers the English Hereford Mappa Mundi as an example of medieval pilgrimage mapping and the local controversy concerning the sale of the parchment from Hereford Cathedral in 1988. This offers opportunity for discussion of T-0 maps and the use of medieval cartography as mystical guides to the edge of heaven's realm. Garfield reaches his most effective commentary with the chapters on the transition from medieval to modern world mapping during the Renaissance, the gradual realization of seafaring discoveries around Africa to Asia, and the parallel cartographic knowledge displayed by the Chinese on their inscribed Stella maps from the 12th century. Then there is the curious case of the Vinland Map--now at Yale--discussed, derided, and decoded since its discovery in 1957. Forgery or premonition, the Vinland Map, with its distinctive modern coastline of Greenland, still begs questions about European knowledge of America and the possibility of Austrian forgery by the monks of Wolfegg Castle. Garfield next tackles the question of "America" and the naming of the New World. Beginning with the rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geographia in 1475 as a printed atlas, the concept of a modern world map was initialized during the flowering of the Italian Renaissance. With the first voyage of Columbus in 1492, the incorporation of New World discoveries literally stretched the edge of the Ptolemaic world to include the coastlines of the revealed cartography. None more so than the Martin Waldseemuller world map of 1507, where the name "AMERICA" was spelled out over modern Brazil. Interspersed with a short "pocket map" chapter on the "Island of California," Garfield follows with his seminal essay on Gerardus Mercator, his cartographic projection and his pioneering World Map of 1569, which set the standard of global displays through the present. Garfield concludes with a set of chapters on Renaissance cartography, focusing on Mercator's posthumous Atlas Cosmographicae, published by his sons in 1595, and defining the concept of a collected book of detailed world maps. With world maps accounted for, Garfield narrows his focus to specific cartographic cases for the remainder of the book. He first offers examples of animistic mapping where the outline borders of subject assume the shape of a familiar animal, as with the classic Massachusetts "salamander" of 1812 that gave rise to the contorted political gerrymander of Governor Elbridge Gerry. …