Mapping the World: Stories of Geography
As albums of cartography go, this one possesses qualities for the unconventional connoisseur. For it is not a history of maps, nor does its text mechanically describe the 87 images of historical maps on offer. Rather, the authors discuss the meaning of geographical representation in cosmic and imaginative terms. To the Laffons, a map is not a tool to orient oneself in a new territory; it is more like a border between such things as the sea and the land, the sky and the earth, the known and the unknown. The cover art, for example, resembles a modernist abstraction of sinuous lines; its color reproduction and text, contained in the body of the book, explain that it is really an eighteenth-century Vietnamese map of China depicting a river, a road, and mountains, and intended to show the difficulty of travel, not the route. Such visual surprises abound in the Laffons’ work, for which they select illustrations from Chinese and Ottoman as well as Western sources. An unusual yet arresting treatment, the Laffons’ inventive approach to cartography has definite artistic appeal. --Gilbert Taylor