On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  This work wasn’t confined to atlases, but it was an atlas published in Amsterdam that best demonstrated what maps had become. The Blaeu Atlas Maior was quite simply the most beautiful, elaborate, expensive, heaviest and stunning work of cartography that the world had ever seen. And everything that followed it – right up to the present day – seems a bit of an anti-climax in comparison.

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  The Blaeu dynasty would dominate European map-making for a century, aided by its own vast printing press, believed to be the largest in the world. But its beginnings are cloudy. We still do not know for certain when its cartographic founder, Willem Blaeu, was born, nor precisely where. Alkmaar (Northern Holland) in 1571 seems to be the most likely combination, with Blaeu moving to Amsterdam in his youth, when he was still known as Willem Janszoon (he joined at least four other Willem Janszoons in the city, which may explain the Blaeu – ‘Blue’ – addition to his name). He began working for his father’s herring company, developed an interest in mathematics and instrumentation, and was apprenticed to the astronomer Tycho Brahe. He then became a bookseller and maritime cartographer, forging an early reputation for his pilot charts, which soon became the principal navigational tools for Dutch shipping.

  Willem gradually moved into terrestrial maps to expand his income, though his skill lay in compilation rather than draughtsmanship. He would commission copperplates from local cartographers, but more often he would buy already engraved plates from other printers in Europe and enhance them with a few additions and lavish colours. But what appears to have accelerated both the scale of his production and his ambition was a feverish battle with a local competitor called Johannes Janssonius. For decades, these rivals fought for an increasingly lucrative market, and together they dominated the Dutch map trade.

  Both Janssonius and Blaeu had back-up – the former worked with Henricus Hondius, while Blaeu was assisted by his two sons Joan and Cornelis – and their focus soon narrowed to one particular specialty, the atlas. Intriguingly and honourably, they didn’t steal each other’s maps but tried to outdo each other on sumptuousness and range. It was with this in mind that in 1634 Willem Blaeu announced plans for his first ‘large map-book’, a compendium of 210 maps, only to find that Janssonius was preparing one of 320 maps. And so the stakes were raised and Blaeu promised an even grander project. When he died in 1638, his son Joan took up the challenge, and the Atlas Maior, produced between 1659 and 1672, was the almost ruinous result. Lavish was only the half of it.

  It was published in eleven volumes in folio size (52.7 × 32.1 cm). Some countries (Germany, England, the Netherlands, Italy and America) got a volume each, while Spain and Portugal shared a volume with Africa, and Greece shared a binding with Sweden, Russia and Poland. The first Latin edition contained 594 maps but there was much else too, the apotheosis of geography as history. There were 21 frontispieces (containing paintings of the Creation, optical and measuring instruments, globes and compasses, portraits of Ptolemy and Greek gods). And there were 3,368 pages of text, in which Blaeu and his colleagues explained a country’s history and customs in a tone both exhaustive and reductive. Germany was ‘very rich thanks to its commerce, its mines of gold, silver and other metals, and to its corn, cattle and other products.’ Scotland was praised for ‘the excellence of the minds that it produces.’ The description of China betrays a reliance on far-off fable. ‘Found in this province [of Peking] are long-haired totally-white cats with floppy ears, as prized as little Maltese dogs, and which the ladies adore.’

  Blaeu’s maps of America contain the first cartographic appearance of ‘New Amsterdam’ as the capital of ‘New Netherland’, but the name would soon be out of date: it became New York City in 1664. America as a whole is still a distant land, and both Greenland and Iceland are considered to be ‘the northern-most part’ of it. ‘Half of America stretches to the west,’ Blaeu wrote. ‘This part is entirely unknown in its interior…’

  The maps themselves are lusciously Baroque. A cartouche would be considered squandered if it wasn’t draped in cherubs or heraldic arms or unicorns. Each sea would be either augmented with trade winds and navigational directions, or else full of galleons, serpents and menacing fish. The wording on the maps is set either with movable type or hand-drawn, while the names of surrounding seas are often drawn in an extravagantly curling script resembling fishing lines. The coastlines are dramatically thick with shading, while mountain ranges, generally of uniform height, look like obstinate rashes.

  The Dutch scholar Peter van de Krogt has calculated that the Blaeu printing works made about 1,550 copies of the atlas in a thirteen-year run, some 1,830,000 sheets. And the cost to the customer reflected the outlay: the uncoloured editions were priced at between 330 and 390 guilders, while the coloured editions cost 430 to 460 guilders depending on the translation and number of maps. At today’s values, this would price a coloured edition at approximately £25,000 or $40,000. What else could you get for this sort of money in the mid-seventeenth century? You could buy ten slaves at 40 guilders each. And for 60 guilders in 1626 you could have bought the island of Manhattan from its native Indians.

  Baroque and berserk: the most beautiful atlas ever – the Blaeu Atlas Maior, published between 1659 and 1672.

  Like teeth adrift in Indonesian waters: the Moluccas, also known as the Spice Islands, as crafted in the appendix to Blaeu’s Atlas Maior.

  That Blaeu was proud of his achievement is clear from his address to his ‘gentle reader’ at the beginning of the atlas. ‘Geography has paved the way not only for the happiness and comfort of humanity but for its glory,’ he writes. ‘Were kingdoms not separated by rivers, mountains, straits, isthmuses and oceans, empires would have no confines nor wars a conclusion.’ He might have added ‘nor wars a cause or purpose,’ but he went on to outline the joy felt by so many who have picked up a map in all centuries: our ability to ‘set eyes on far-off places without so much as leaving home.’ He praised Ptolemy, Ortelius, Mercator, and England’s William Camden (whose descriptions of the British Isles he copied), and he ends with a plea to the reader to forgive his mistakes (‘easily made when describing a place one has never seen’) and to send him maps of their own making. It was a humble address considering the bombastic product that followed it.

  Astonishingly, Blaeu would help to create one further and even greater atlas: the Klencke Atlas. This was a one-off, produced in 1660 by Joan Klencke and a group of Dutch merchants as a gift for King Charles II of England at the restoration of the monarchy. At 1.78m high by 1.05m wide, it was the largest atlas in the world, and featured countries and continents from the Blaeu and Hondius dynasties. It’s been at the British Library for almost two centuries, and in the Guinness Book of World Records since its records began.

  Like the Klencke wonder, Blaeu’s atlas was not a collection of maps to take on a voyage; it was a rich man’s plaything, the sort of thing that in a different age would appear alongside Ferraris in glossy magazines. The fact that Blaeu’s atlas was not always the most up-to-date was not of prime concern (his maps of England, for instance, were more than 30 years old). For cartography had entered yet another phase – a period of flamboyancy and ornamentation, where the luxuriousness and sheer weight of an atlas was judged to be more important than its practical quality and accuracy. It would take a century – and the emergence of the French ‘scientific’ school of map-making – to reverse this trend.

  It is not known whether Joan Blaeu recouped his costs, but in the end the gods may have done his final accounting. As new editions of the Atlas Maior were being planned in1672, a huge fire swept through the Blaeu workshop and destroyed many of the copper plates required for further printings. Joan Blaeu died the following year at the age of seventy-six. No one would produce such a tragically magnificent book again. But many would try, and to glimpse the most famous we need to leap forward a couple of centuries.

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  On Wednesday 2 January 1895, a brief advertisement appeared in the London
Times classifieds: it announced that in early April a new atlas would be published containing 117 pages of new maps with an index of more than 125,000 place names. As was the fashion, the atlas would be issued in serial form, fifteen weekly parts at one shilling each. A month later, another advert carried more information and a harder sell:

  ‘To newspaper readers of the present day a good Atlas is absolutely indispensable. In order to enable the public to obtain the full advantage of the information contained in the paper, it has been decided to offer to them, at a price within the reach of all, an Atlas of the very highest quality, which will form an inseparable and indispensable companion to the newspaper.’

  And thus was The Times Atlas born. The 117 pages would be 17 × 11 inches and display 173 maps in colour. Eleven pages would be devoted to Africa, while there would also be extensive coverage of the ‘Indian Question’, the war between China and Japan, and all the latest developments in polar exploration. The advertisements even carried a review from the Manchester Guardian (‘Superior to English atlases at 10 guineas. We have no hesitation in saying that the publication of this atlas will mark an epoch in English geographical teaching and study’). When the atlas was published in bound form, the 125,000 place names had increased to 130,000, and there was an explanation on the Contents page. ‘Owing to the fact that the maps … embody additions and corrections which have been made, in some cases, only a few days before going to press, it has been found impossible to incorporate the whole of the names of places to be found in the present edition in the main Index.’ So a supplementary index was attached, which contained thousands more. A great many were in Africa and South America.

  Six years later there was an updated edition, and the trend was edging towards the luxury seventeenth-century Dutch items: for 24 shillings you could purchase the atlas in ‘extra cloth’; for 30 shillings you could get it in ‘half Morocco’ (a bit of calf-skin that might put readers in mind of the Mappa Mundi); and for 50 shillings you could obtain the utterly leather ‘Edition De Luxe’.

  The original Times Atlas was an impressive and popular product, but at the time it didn’t stand greatly apart from its competition – in particular rival tomes from Philips and the map shop Stanfords. Each of these offered small details that the others didn’t, had claims on comprehensiveness, and an eye on posterity. But half a century on, The Times Atlas emerged in a new version that made all others look like yesterday’s news. The 1955 edition appeared in five volumes, making it massively more comprehensive than before and with publicity materials determined to make librarians put in an order at once (for £22). The volumes prided themselves on their new political boundaries and the fine gradation of ink tints to denote altitude. The maps signalled a shift in geography, too. The first Times atlases were based on German maps, but they had subsequently switched to the Scottish cartographic firm of Bartholomew, and the new atlas was Scottish to the core.

  The Times Atlas – a decent size for the Empire in 1895.

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  It is curious how rival map-makers come up with major innovations at similar times. Like Janssonius and Blaeu, The New Times Atlas had a significant rival – this time across the Atlantic.

  The newcomer was the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, published in 1953 in Chicago, which is regarded by many as the most beautiful and original modern atlas ever made. Edited by Herbert Bayer, a former master at the Bauhaus school who fled to New York in the 1930s, the book was a daring early exercise in information graphics. Bayer and his designers believed that it wasn’t enough to just print and bind current maps – they wanted to explain what the maps showed and how the world was changing; the reality, in other words, of what it was really like to live in the transformative years after World War II. (Bayer worked for a while at the leading advertising firm J. Walter Thompson; he was one of the archetypal Mad Men.)

  The book was published in a small private edition by the Container Corporation of America and was never commercially available, although many of the world’s major reference libraries recognised its value and managed to obtain a copy. Almost sixty years after publication it remains a stunning thing to behold, as fresh and groundbreaking as the Helvetica typeface of the same decade; both reflect a clear-headed modernism. The atlas is sub-titled A Composite of Man’s Environment, with the standard world maps abetted by sections on economics, geology, geography, demography, astrology and climatology. But what really sets it apart is the use of diagrammatic and pictorial images (some 2,200 illustrations, charts and symbols in all – and pre-computer) to demonstrate the way we live. The slightly awkward title (Geo-Graphic) was designed to highlight the use of pictograms, charts and other infographics.

  Some of the diagrams are just fun, such as the ‘arrow map’ of the United States showing the best East-West route through every US State from Maine to Washington State. Others point up ecological concerns; even in 1953 it was clear that the world was running out of the natural resources required to feed a rapidly growing population, let alone meet our demands for mineral fuels. As Bayer made clear in his preface, the atlas was designed with a consciously pacifist and environmental ‘whole-earth’ direction, taking root several years before the approach became a liberal foundation-stone of the 1960s. ‘Political inferences have been avoided whenever possible,’ Bayer wrote, ‘because a global concept of this earth, its people and life sources necessarily rejects implications of power, strategy, force and suppression.’ But it remained provocative throughout, illustrating such things as the US migration routes of Indian tribes and Norse peoples.

  The world meets the modernist: Bayer’s magnificent and influential Geo-Graphic Atlas from 1953.

  The atlas was also bang up to date: an addenda included the news that there was a new ‘highest point reached by mountain climbers: 29,002 feet,’ marking the ascent of Everest in May 1953. The atlas achieves an immediacy and relevance that the grander, more traditional atlases never could, and it is inspirational to all who see it.

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  Two people who probably did fall under the Geo-Graphic spell were Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal, the radical duo behind The State of the World Atlas. This first appeared in 1981 as a self-styled volume of ‘cartojournalism’ published by the radical socialist Pluto Press, and became a bestseller. It was as much an anti-capitalist manifesto as it was geography, and it encouraged the reader to view the world in a new light, the same way one’s conventional idea of a portrait might change after seeing a Picasso.

  Every double-page spread was essentially the same – a condensed map of the world portrayed either with each country drawn in its recognisable shape or as a rectangular block – but overlaid with a message of inequality. These ranged from a survey of countries’ trade union membership to a map of state censorship, in which countries were divided up into varying degrees of (il)liberalism. The maps help to turn agitprop into witty graphic art with spreads entitled ‘This Little Piggy’ (to denote workers who toil unproductively) and ‘Dirt’s Cheap’ (to denote polluted air). In the fourth edition (a decade after the first), the atlas contained many symbols that had yet to be recognised by the Ordnance Survey: padlocks, men in suits holding champagne glasses, armed militia and very thin people with begging bowls. By the eighth edition from 2008, the topics had expanded to terrorism, obesity, sex tourism, gay rights and children’s rights.

  Not a lot of free speech around: a state censorship map – entitled ‘See, Hear, Speak No Evil’ – from the 1990 State of the World Atlas.

  The State of the World Atlas was followed by The War Atlas, which had fewer visual jokes and more retreating armies, and by a succession of politically themed books: The Atlas of Food, The Atlas of Water, The Tobacco Atlas, all displaying what would otherwise be deadening tables in a devastating way. They remain in print and online.

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  And whatever happened to the hernia-inducing really big atlas, the one that reached its peak with Joan Blaeu and the walk-in Klencke atlas in the 1660s? It’s back, more hos
pitalising than ever. In 2009, a company called Millennium House published something called Earth – a 580-page, 24 × 18.5 inch monster. According to its promotional blurb it takes ‘cartography and publishing to a new stratosphere,’ a huge mixture of maps, pictures and six-foot gatefolds, each individually numbered ‘by our calligrapher in Hong Kong.’

  The island of serious paper cuts: the Earth Platinum Edition unveiled page by heavy page.

  It was, almost inevitably, bound in leather and hand-tooled and hand-gilded, ‘a legacy for future generations.’ There were two editions, the first Royal Blue version with a 2,000 copy print run costing £2,400, and the Imperial Gold edition of 1,000 copies with a price upon application. But before you could apply for the price, Millennium House brought out its Earth Platinum Edition, which made the others look like a postage stamp. This was the biggest book ever made – bigger, at 1.8m × 1.4m, than the British Library’s Klencke. And better because it was for sale, albeit at $100,000. The print run was thirty-one.

  The atlas needed its own plane to fly it to its wealthy owners, as well as six people to lift it. The people from the Guinness Book of World Records duly confirmed that it was indeed something special, and at the beginning of 2012 it officially became the biggest, most expensive, most user unfriendly atlas of the world in the world.

  Pocket Map

  Lions, Eagles and Gerrymanders

  The Blaeu Atlas Maior took the atlas to new heights of clarity and comprehensiveness – but one thing it didn’t forsake were the animals, which had roamed freely on maps for centuries, usually adorning a border, or a blank expanse of land or ocean, and occasionally taking over completely.