THE ATLAS OF ATLASES: Exploring the most important atlases in history and the cartographers who made them
PHILIP PARKER
Ivy Press
$40.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: This beatutiful book is a lavishly illustrated look at the most important atlases in history and the cartographers who made them.
Atlases are
books that changed the course of history. Pored over by rulers, explorers, and adventures these books were used to
build empires, wage wars, encourage diplomacy, and
nurture trade.
Written by Philip Parker, an authority on the history of maps, this book
brings these fascinating artefacts to life, offering a unique,
lavishly illustrated guide to the history of these incredible books and the cartographers behind them.
All key cartographic works from the last half-millennium are covered, including:
The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered the world’s first atlas and produced in 1570 by the Dutch, geographer Abraham Ortelius,
The 17th-century Klencke—one of the world’s largest books that requires 6 people to carry it,
The Rand McNally Atlas of 1881, still in print today and a book that turned its makers, William H. Rand and Andrew McNally into cartographic royalty.
This beautiful book will
engross readers with its detailed, visually stunning illustrations and fascinating story of how map-making has developed throughout human history.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: There is, on every gifting list, that guy. The one you just...can't...figure...out what to gift. Often they're smart, and deeply interested in something, usually something you've never heard of or think is so boring you'd rather pluck your nose hairs with needlenose pliers than think about.
This is the present you need for that guy, whatever gender they present and/or identify as.
Politics? You damned well better bet that politics-obsessed guy knows about maps and their political implications. Author Parker does, too. There's a huge amount of trouble stirred up in this world by making changes to maps. The Gulf War of 1990 was sparked when Saddam Hussein published a map showing Kuwait as Iraq's nineteenth province. Yes, to be clear, it was an excuse but it passed the sniff test around the world...that is how powerful a map is as a political statement.
India and Pakistan, created from one VAST swathe of land by a few strokes of the Imperial British pen...decades of war over Kashmir being there not here, here not there. Israel? Do I even need to type it? The Toledo Strip in the US? Your politics-obsessed guy
The history guy...the one who, when awakened from sound slumber can rattle off the presidents of the United States in order starting from the ninth (actually pretty interesting, William Henry Harrison, he was...oh, right, back to what I was saying before) or the Khmer Empire's date of foundation (or as close as we can get, anyway, the seventh century CE wasn't a time with hugely good surviving material culture in writing since they didn't have...yeah, yeah, okay)
certainly knows what maps really mean in the world.
What better way to chart a culture's opinion of itself and its history, not to mention its future, than to look at its maps? Or maybe even more importantly, who drew or draws its maps and why...the US Government produced the Atlas of the United States on paper until 2007 then digitally until 2014, and now...Google does it. The GPS revolution, the web that Time Berners-Lee imagined and enabled with his hyperlinking technology, all depend on an infrastructure less than half a century old. Atlases and maps are centuries old. Paper is ephemeral, it's true, but pixels are barely even real.
What makes a book like this one so fun for that guy to read is that it's readable. I adored
GLOBES: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power when I reviewed it for #Booksgiving in 2017 (and it's still available, in stock and ready to ship!), but it wasn't as readable as this book is. Part of that was the coffee-table-ness and part of it was the brief it set itself. This, too, is a coffee table book but it's got a different brief. The globe is an object with a special history, one that includes the social and historical importance that atlases have, but also a physicality and social statement of power and prestige that requires a denser academic argument than does a maps-and-atlases book. It also has an earlier end-point than does a book of map-making and -publishing history given that we are amid a technological revolution with even greater import to maps and atlases than to globes. They're beautiful objects but their role has become completely virtual with the massive increases in computing power and digital storage technology.
The text of
The Atlas of Atlases asks little enough of you to make it possible to skim while sitting around post-gifting and making small talk. There is enough heft to the subjects covered, from Ortelius's first-ever compilation of printed maps that he entitled "Atlas" after the world-supporting Titan of that name in 1570, to Google Maps and its ever-expanding and slightly threatening ubiquity, to keep anyone in this interest group riveted.
The look of surprised happiness on that guy's face as this multi-layered feast for the eyes and the brain is revealed will more than recompense the mere $40 (less if you shop for it) you shell out. Hard to buy for people, when they get this kind of gift, are always so satisfying to please.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
COLORS OF LONDON: A History
PETER ACKROYD
Frances Lincoln Ltd
$40.00 hardcover,
available now
Rating: 5* of five
//
The Publisher Says: Celebrated novelist, biographer, and critic Peter Ackroyd paints a vivid picture of one of the world's greatest cities in this brilliant and original work, exploring how the city's many hues have come to shape its history and identity.
Think of the colors of London and what do you imagine? The
reds of open-top buses and terracotta bricks? The
grey smog of Victorian industry, Portland stone, and pigeons in Trafalgar square? Or the gradations of
yellows,
violets, and
blues that shimmer on the Thames at sunset—reflecting
the incandescent light of a city that never truly goes dark. We associate
green with royal parks and the District Line; gold with royal carriages, the Golden Lane Estate, and the tops of monuments and cathedrals.
Colors of London shows us that
color is everywhere in the city, and each one holds
myriad links to its past. The colors of London have
inspired artists (Whistler, Van Gogh, Turner, Monet),
designers (Harry Beck) and
social reformers (Charles Booth). And from the city’s first origins, Ackroyd shows how color is always to be found at the
heart of London’s history, from the
blazing reds of the Great Fire of London to the
blackouts of the Blitz to the bold colors of
royal celebrations and vibrant street life.
This beautifully written book examines the city's
fascinating relationship with color, alongside
specially commissioned colorised photographs from Dynamichrome, which
bring a lost London back to life.
London has been the main character in Ackroyd's work ever since his first novel, and he has won countless prizes in both fiction and non-fiction for his truly remarkable body of work. Here, he channels
a lifetime of knowledge of the great city, writing with
clarity and passion about the hues and shades which have shaped London's journey through history into the present day.
A truly invaluable book for lovers of art, history, photography, or urban geography, this beautifully illustrated title tells a rich and fascinating story of the history of this great and ever-changing city.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Gifting the Anglophile on your list is always a doddle, right? "Something about England!" the generous, but innocent, gifter thinks. "This will be a snap!"
*cue hollow laughter at callow ignorance*
What
part of England...north, south, west, Kent? What
time in English history...Thatcher's 1980s, Victoria's imperial experiment, William the Bastard's conquering hordes of French-speaking Vikings?
England England or Britain...Britain as a whole, the constituent parts?
I know it's not going to soothe your frazzled last nerve enough to make the idea of a cocktail unnecessary...but there aren't a lot of people who read seriously who haven't heard of, and probably read something by, Peter Ackroyd. He's a cultural monadnock. While one might not adore his prose, or even want to read about his
relentlessly centered-on-London stories, it's a whole different kettle of fresh-from-the-Thames eels to think of reading his spear-sharp and sword-long prose
about London...accompanied by these startlingly colorized vintage photos of London's past. The firm
Dynamichrome makes this its business, and let me tell you that they are clearly destined to be leaders in a revolution
for instead of the hitherto prevalent against the colorizing trend. These are images of London from all periods in its history. They're as beautiful as photos of London get. They're also enhanced by the careful and painstaking additions of colors commensurate with the time in history as well as the time of day that they reveal.
The book's organizing principle is seen in the Table of Contents on the recto above presented. Ackroyd's essays, which I suggest is the best way to present and think of these nominal chapters, riff on the colors, the affects, the gestalt of the visual impact of London. The publishers then chose vintage images and Dynamichrome brought their intense, archivally trained eyes to bear on enlivening them with colors appropriate to and emblematic of the times.
Bloody gorgeous, mate.
London's suitability for gifting your Anglophile without getting the weak smile and the slide from a slack, uninterested hand that we all dread is nonpareil. It's been the focus of immense amounts of attention in the moments of history as well as scholarship about that history, so it is readily scannable. It is a major player in the world's economic life, and its social norms have both set and influenced the social norms of many, many countries with past and present ties to it. London isn't England (me, I prefer York, or Chester) but it is called "the Capital" for a reason. It is the head of the government, the home of the economy's engine-controlling bodies, the monarchy's most famous symbols reside there...London is part of the mental furniture of the world's mind.
It's a simple task to find illustrations for a book about London, and an even easier one to gloss over the role of color in Humankind's experience of its world. We are fortunate to have photographic evidence of the reality of London's nineteenth-century past on forward. Beginning just slightly earlier, we have color illustrations of life in London from the eighteenth century. Printing technology has improved and improved in the centuries since Gutenberg married woodblock image-making to moveable type in 1454. That's been a key development in history's accelerating climb into prosperity from subsistence levels to reliable surpluses to wretched excess. Knowledge and ideas are easily transmissible when they're on paper.
They're also ephemeral, and subject to manipulation; they're also incomplete and misleading. But they're less likely to vanish without a trace as, for example, the cure for scurvy did in the sixteenth century when French captain Jacques Cartier heard from Native Americans that his men's scurvy would vanish if he made them drink spruce-needle tisane. It did...but he didn't do much to make it known, and it got lost in archives. Much as that has impacted our view of scurvy's history, the lack of color in vintage photos has made our vision of the past flat and one-dimensional.
We've always lived in a world of color. Nature's colors, but also mankind's. Rescue your Anglophile's imagination from the curse of flat black-and-white thinking with this book. It's vivid, and in its vividness lies its power to inform and to build on our knowledge of one of the world's most important cities: It was always modern, it was always intense, it was always brightly and intensely modern. Celebrate that this Yule gifting season.
