Table of Contents
For the Love of Maps: Foreword Dava Sobel 11
Introduction: The Map That Wrote Itself 15
1 What Great Minds Knew 21
How the ancient Greeks-Eratosthenes and Ptolemy-first worked out the size and shape of the world and our place upon it.
2 The Men Who Sold the World 42
The day Britain's greatest cartographic treasure-the medieval Mappa Mundi-went to the auction houses to fix a leaky roof.
It's 1250, Do You Know Where You Are? 58
3 The World Takes Shape 63
The world centers on Jerusalem-and the Poles appear.
Here Be Dragons 72
4 Venice, China and a Trip to the Moon 75
How the Italians became the world's greatest mapmakers, and then the Germans, and then the Dutch. And how a Venetian friar discovered the secrets of the East and ended up on the moon.
5 The Mystery of Vinland 87
Did Norse sailors really reach and map America before Columbus?
Or is the world's most curious map fakery's finest hour?
6 Welcome to Amerigo 103
In which Ptolemy reappears in Europe and America gets named after the wrong man.
California as an Island 121
7 What's the Good of Mercator? 125
How the world looked in 1569-and today, even if the UN still favors the Postel Azimuthal Equidistant.
Keeping It Quiet: Drake's Silver Voyage 135
8 The World in a Book 140
In which the Atlas becomes a craze in seventeenth-century Holland, is adopted by The Times, and then turns to agitprop.
Lions, Eagles and Gerrymanders 160
9 Mapping a Cittee (without forder troble) 167
London gets the map bug, too, pioneers street mapping, and John Ogilby charts the course of every major road in Britannia.
10 Six Increasingly Coordinated Tales of the Ordnance Survey 181
Britain, spurred by Jacobite revolt, makes the Ordnance Survey, extending to India. But what is the symbol for a picnic site?
A Nineteenth-Century Murder Map 200
11 The Legendary Mountains of Kong 204
How an impassable mountain range spread and spread, until a French army officer found it wasn't there.
The Low-down Lying Case of Benjamin Morrell 220
12 The Opening of America and the Gridding of Manhattan 223
How Lewis and Clark filled out the American canvas, and how New York plotted its future.
13 Cholera and the Map that Stopped It 235
How mapping played its part in identifying the cause of the disease.
Across Australia with Burke and Wills 246
14 "X" Marks the Spot: Treasure Island 252
Treasure maps in literature and life.
J.M. Barrie Fails to Fold a Pocket Map 267
15 The Worst Journey in the World to the Last Place to Be Mapped 269
How explorers found the South Pole without a map, and named the region after their families, friends and enemies.
Charles Booth Thinks You're Vicious 288
16 Maps in All Our Hands: A Brief History of the Guidebook 293
The majestic foldout engravings of Murray and Baedeker give way to another cartographic dark age.
The Biggest Map of All: Beck's London Tube 307
17 Casablanca, Harry Potter and Where Jennifer Aniston Lives 313
In which the Muppets perfect travel by map and we stalk the stars.
A Hare-raising Masquerade 324
18 How to Make a Very Big Globe 327
From scratch ... when you used to run a bowling alley.
Churchill's Map Room 347
19 The Biggest Map Dealer, the Biggest Map Thief 352
How tempting are maps-and just what kind of dealers and thieves do they attract?
Women Can't Read Maps. Oh, Really? 366
20 Driving into Lakes: How GPS Put the World in a Box 372
How we learned to watch the dullest in-flight movie ever-and, with GPS, the Dutch once again took over the world's mapping.
The Canals of Mars 385
21 Pass Go and Proceed Directly to Skyrim 394
Maps as games, from jigsaw puzzles to Risk, and why computer games may be the future of cartography.
22 Mapping the Brain 410
What taxi drivers have to offer the world of the neuroscientist.
Epilogue: The Instant, Always-On, Me-Mapping of Everywhere 424
How the Internet changed everything.
Acknowledgments 444
Bibliography 446
Picture Credits 449
Index 450