Map me no maps

Of course, not everything on our shelves, or everything we read, is a book.  One of my great pleasures is looking at maps, to plan a journey, or to understand one.  Maps  - and this is my collection here, a bit overpowered by the Ordnance Survey's magenta - are not neutral: they may be accurate, but they make statements about where the centre of the world is, what is important; they omit and they emphasise; they assert and deny ownership and control.

I remember a wonderful exhibition of maps at the British Library some years ago. As the world has been better explored, maps have been less and less technically wrong - but a curved surface portrayed on a flat one always exaggerates some areas, shrinks others.  Africa is much bigger than we all think, Britain is smaller.  And then there are the judgements masquerading as cartography - a map of Victorian London with streets coloured for social class and wealth; the lowest category was "criminal"!  Nazi maps of European cities showing Jewish areas evoke similar horror.  Thus, perhaps, Fielding's exclamation:  "Map me no maps, sir, my head is a map, a map of the whole world".

Borges has a wonderful passsage on the perfect map, in A Universal History of Infamy, a book (like all of Borges), which I thoroughly recommend for its wonderful writing, fantastic perception, and piercing illumination of the human mental condition.  Enjoy The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate or the moody, almost hard boiled Streetcorner Man.  I will return to Borges, for sure, one day, but now, here is the whole of his Of Exactitude in Science:

"…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of
the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these
Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the
Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the
Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the
Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the
whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography."

Comments

[AP US History Essay]

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[Harriet]

You have a very organised map shelf!

[Peter the flautist]

A nice list, plus a few illustrations, of the main variety of cartographic projections can be found here http://opendx.npaci.edu/cds/proceedings96/cart/cart.html and another site, with some very helpful illustrations is here http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/mapproj/mapproj.html

Dark Puss