The Globemaker

Peter Bellerby - The Globemaker from Cabnine on Vimeo.

The Oldest Known Globe to Represent the New World Discovered

Dated to the early 1500s, the globe was likely crafted in Florence, Italy, from the lower halves of two ostrich eggs.

From a piece in the Huffington Post...

The anonymous owner of the globe, who bought it in 2012 at the London Map Fair, allowed Missinne to investigate the globe. The researcher used carbon dating, computer tomography testing, an ink assessment, as well as a geographical, cartographic, and historical analysis.

He determined that the grapefruit-sized globe was made around 1504 and was likely used to cast the famous copper Lenox globe housed at the New York Public Library, which, until now, had been thought to be the oldest globe to show the Americas, dated to 1510.

A Collection of Very Strange Maps

Enjoy!

Maps of Comic Book Locations

Comics Alliance takes a look at a few (including Batman's Gotham City), here.

How Google Earth Can Help Writers

Write what you know? How about write what you can learn using Google Maps?

From a piece in the New York Times...

If you want to write about North Korea, it’s not hard to find pictures of the monuments and colossal boulevards of Pyongyang, the capital city, because these are the images sanctioned and disseminated by the government, and all that any visitor allowed into North Korea is allowed to see of it. But if you are interested in the rest of the country — at least if you are a writer who wants to put characters on the ground there — the obvious problem becomes: How to render what these characters see? How to describe the topography of the landscape? In essence, how to breach the misanthropy of a country just for getting its street names right? 

Enter Google Earth. Enter Google Maps. 

I happened on Google Earth a few years ago while reading up on Scientology and, O.K., about John Travolta and his demesne, which can apparently accommodate two private planes. But don’t believe me, see for yourself: here are the coordinates on Google Earth. . . . Wait — what? I downloaded the program and was, in an instant, floored by this technology. Forget Travolta’s place. I could visit the Grand Canyon, which, unbelievably, I once drove right by without stopping. I could check out aerial photos of cattle worldwide and see if they really do orient themselves along a north-south axis while they graze. I could return to my childhood home in Cleveland. And perhaps most astonishingly, I could take a look at North Korea — at a map of the country overlaid with satellite imagery and captions. What an incredible resource for a writer. If you can’t get to a place yourself, spy on it.

Handkerchief Maps

A map...on a handkerchief.

From a piece on Booktryst...

Handkerchief maps date back to the late 18th century. Examples featuring the plan for Washington D.C. werre sold as "'an authentic plan of the Metropolis of the United States,' advertised as an accurate guide for the prospective purchaser of lots but also as 'a very handsome ornament for the parlor or counting room" (Luria, Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, p. 14). These handkerchief maps are believed to have been printed in Boston in 1792 in connection with "the sale of lots in the new 'Federal Town'" (Works Progress Administration, Washington: City and Capital, p. xiv).

Finding the Route, But Losing the Way

The Los Angeles Times praises fold-out maps.

From the piece...

J.M. Barrie was 29 and living in Edinburgh when he noticed a trend in bookshops along the main street. When paying for your purchases at the counter, the bookseller would offer a new map that was "convenient for the pocket." This, Barrie told readers of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, was tantamount to offering someone a prolonged period of unhappiness. He believed that almost every house in the city contained a map that the whole family, working together, could not shut. The energy expended in denouncing these maps "would build the Eiffel Tower in 13 weeks" (the tower had only recently opened and was hot news).

What to do when faced with this calumny? "Don't kick it around the room," Barrie advises, and "don't blame your wife." No wonder the directions to Neverland were as vague as "second to the right and straight on till morning."

Barrie would have loved the present day. Hardly any folding maps now, of course, bar that mass of old crinkle clogging up the glove compartment. For why would anyone bother with them these days, and why would anyone risk ridicule by going to a store and spending money on one? Ah, let me count the ways....

Map Portraits

The artwork of Ed Fairburn.

Paper Maps vs. Digital Maps

The World's Largest Atlas

Enjoy!

Atlas for the Blind

Microcities highlights a marvelous book published in 1837 to help blind kids visualize geography.

Rare 16th Century Map of America Found in Germany

The BBC notes that a map, known as the "birth certificate of America" has been found.

From the article...

The map, by the famous cartographer Martin Waldseemueller, is credited with being the first to document and name the newly-discovered land of America.

It had been thought that Waldseemueller had only made four copies, but researchers at a Munich university have now discovered a fifth version.

This new map was found in the pages of an unrelated 19th century book.

Sven Kuttner, head of old books at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, said: "It seems to be a second edition and this is a unique map. Until now, we have no signs for a further map like this."

The Art of Travel

Collectors and dealers are preparing for Europe’s biggest antiquarian map fair. But what does the future hold for printed maps in the digital age?

From a story in the Financial Times...

It’s a big year for antique maps. This is the 500th anniversary of the birth of the world’s most celebrated mapmaker, Gerard Mercator, who created the world’s first atlas. I have to reveal an interest here. In the 1990s I spent thousands of hours writing a biography of the great man. There were moments, hunched over one of his original prints in the Map Room of the British Library, when I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Visiting the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I almost burst into tears when the archivist brought me his extraordinary globe of 1541. I’d read every paper published about the globe but I was so unprepared for its craftsmanship that I found myself immobilised by bewilderment. It was Mercator who devised the unique “projection” that allows the spherical globe to be flattened into a map in such a way that compass bearings remain constant. Today, Mercator’s Projection is used by the Ordnance Survey to map Britain, by Nasa to map the solar system, and for numerous other applications besides.

Charting the Unknown

AbeBooks revels in collectible maps and cartography, here.

Rare Book Feast

Rare Book Feast #1: Herbert Bayer’s Book of Maps from Nate Burgos on Vimeo.

George Washington and His Maps

In Smithsonian, there's a discussion about how our first president used cartography to get a feel of the young nation.

From the article...

First in war.

First in peace.

First to look at a map whenever he had a question about waging the former and sustaining the latter.

It’s not how we typically picture George Washington: bent over a map by candlelight, scrutinizing, measuring and in some cases actually drawing the topographical details that would help conquer a wilderness, win a war, create a republic. But as historian Barnet Schecter shows us in his illustrated new history, George Washington’s America: a Biography through His Maps, many of our first president’s decisions during his long career as a surveyor, soldier and statesman were made only after careful readings of the existing cartographical materials.

Maps to Places Real and Places Richly Imagined

The Philadelphia Inquirer has an interesting story about the Hand Drawn Map Association.

From the article...

Ever heard of the Hand Drawn Map Association? You're not alone, though dedicated map followers know it well.

Founded in 2008 by Fishtown artist and designer Kris Harzinski, an obsessive collector of ephemera, it is, for the time being, Harzinski's collection of all kinds of handmade maps, from directions from a laundromat to a sushi restaurant, rendered in a few black lines on a scrap of a paper, to a complex map of the Chicago suburbs drawn by an 8-year-old wunderkind. (It's also the subject of a charming new book, From Here to There, published by the Princeton Architectural Press.)

"Art," per se, is not a pursuit of Harzinski's, and though some of the works in his archive happen to be by artists, he sensibly borrowed works from artists and various collections to flesh out his exhibition "Nowhere: Selections From the Files of the Hand Drawn Map Association" at Arcadia University Art Gallery.

A good idea, since these non-HDMA artworks add a level of sophistication and intention to the show, and emphasize the widespread incorporation of the map and diagram into contemporary art.

Mapping Out the American Dream

How do the maps we make shape our vision of the world around us? Chart the multiple identities of the United States, from the territories of Native American tribes to the network of flights, with a peek at Mapping America on the UK's Guardian.

Ten of the Greatest Maps That Changed the World

The list, according to Peter Barber, Head of Map Collections at the British Library.

Hand-Drawn Maps

Slate has an interesting collection of hand-drawn maps. From firefighters to club-hoppers, Boy Scout dads to Alexander Calder, they're all here.