The library of lost maps

This exquisite volume from geographer Cheshire (Atlas of Finance) shares hidden treasures contained within the University College London's Map Library. On a research trip, Cheshire discovered "thousands of maps and hundreds of atlases" among the dusty shelves and overstuffed drawers of the little-perused archive. They include a 19th-century map of Italy carried by influential geologist George Bellas Greenough on his travels, and one of the last maps of Hiroshima printed before the city's decimation by the atomic bomb. More obscure finds include a pile of maps by the aptly named Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, a 19th-century group committed to "creating maps of the highest quality at the lowest price." Cheshire not only shares his joy at digging through the archives, but also astutely charts how maps offer a new angle on historical events. For example, a tightly folded tourist map of Madrid, originally from 1929 but stamped with a swastika from 1940, reveals how such maps were frequently collected by military cartographers "to copy for operational charts." Elsewhere, he touches on prominent figures in the history of cartography, among them Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp, a couple who mapped the ocean floor and also fought furiously, resulting in maps "being torn up." It amounts to an enlightening and lovingly presented tribute to the necessity and wonder of libraries and archives. (Oct.)

Looking at maps in a new light. Midway through his handsomely illustrated study of mapmaking, Cheshire quotes diarist Harold Nicolson's eyewitness account of President Woodrow Wilson kneeling over a map at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, tracing new borders with his finger. The scene captures the book's central concern: our enduring desire to organize the world through cartography. As the writer Peter Turchi has noted--a line Cheshire quotes--"The first lie of a map, also the first lie of fiction, is that it is the truth." A professor of geographic information and cartography at University College London, Cheshire writes from inside the university's Map Library, a warren of drawers containing 40,000 maps. He is an infectious guide, tracing how maps evolved from hand-tinted curiosities to instruments of science, propaganda, and power. During World War II, the Allies printed billions of map sheets and raided Axis archives for more, including nine tons seized from a single German publisher. Yet even the most precise charts could not capture the mud and confusion of the trenches; tidiness, he shows, often conceals chaos. Victorian mapmakers such as George Bellas Greenough and Heinrich Berghaus turned geography into both art and ideology. Ethnographic maps hardened into justifications for empire and war, while national atlases--like Finland's in 1899--helped invent the very nations they depicted. Not everyone approved of cartography's instinct to capture a changing world. When the art critic John Ruskin ordered a map from Stanfords of Covent Garden (still in business), he insisted it omit the new railway lines, calling them the "oddest" of "stupidities of modern education." To "tidy the map," Cheshire reminds us, is to risk mistaking lines on paper for the real world they seek to contain. A concise and engrossing study of cartographers' urge to make the world behave. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.