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

by Garfield, Simon

  Maps and panoramas folding out luxuriantly from Baedeker’s Rhineland.

  But for the fan of cartography, the classic Baedekers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century remain dazzling. Far more generous in number than Murray, the Baedeker maps covered both city and rural walking routes, and were particularly strong on ancient sites and mountain passes. Each new edition usually brought new maps, and just as well, for their propensity to tear, crumble and become detached from their bindings – they came at you from all angles – was as much of a feature as their topography. From one single map accompanying a reprinting of the Rhine guide in 1846, there were suddenly seventeen in the edition of 1866 and seventy in 1912. There was one lonely Swiss map in 1852, but eighty-two in 1930.

  The maps began as simple engravings, but appeared in two or three colours from 1870. It was fitting, given its pedigree as the centre of so many medieval maps, that the first colour map was of Jerusalem (in the volume on Palestine and Syria). The colours chosen became lodged in the mind as no cartographic branding before it. The inland and dense city areas appeared in an ochre reminiscent of the clay dust one is unable to wash away from holiday sandals, while the green looked arsenical and the washed-out pastel blue made the coastal regions and lagoons look dry and oddly unappealing.*

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  The Baedekers – in their classic editions – disappeared after the Second World War. Murray’s Handbooks had been sold some years before, in 1910, to Stanfords, before being acquired in 1915 by two Scottish brothers, James and Findlay Muirhead. The Muirheads had actually worked at Baedeker’s, editing the English language editions, until the outbreak of the First World War found them out of a job. They continued the learned, encyclopedic traditions of the two grand guides as the Blue Guides, which for a decade or two operated an Anglo-French alliance, before Les Guides Bleus went their own Gallic way in the 1930s.

  Baedeker’s map of Odessa – delicately engraved in shades of yellow, ochre and black – from the 1892 edition of Russland.

  The Blue Guides – both English and French – maintained the mapping traditions of their predecessors, albeit with less extravagance: the fold-outs were scaled back and their focus became more scholarly, with maps devoted principally to archeological sites and church plans. But the decades after the Second World War were a thin time for tourism and guidebooks, as an impoverished Europe holidayed largely at home. And for Baedeker, you might argue, the glory days had been those before the First World War. The novelist Jonathan Keates observed that a 1912 Baedeker from a town in south-eastern Europe boasted the Grand, the Europa and the Radetzky hotels, some old mosques, and some fine shops in the Appelkai selling carpets and inlaid metalwork. And then, two years later, a car carrying an Archduke passes along the same road in Sarajevo and is met by a man with a revolver, and ‘in the echo of the shots he fires we hear the portable paradise of Baedeker and Murray vanishing into air.’

  Things were rather brighter for guidebooks and maps in post-war France, where the cartographic future was entrusted to the tyre company Michelin, whose maps and guides began in 1900 and flourished like no other. That’s because there was no other guidebook like them, nor any with maps with such a particular purpose. They began as a promotional wheeze to sell pneumatic tyres, sold as much to cyclists as motorists (in fact for the first few years the maps and books were given away free). Maps became central to the operation in 1910, guiding pleasure seekers to repair garages and petrol fill-ups, and increasingly to approved board and lodging (the three-star grading system, initially used for hotels with a restaurant, was introduced in 1931). Many pictograms in the guide and on the maps were esoteric, including a tilted shaded square indicating a hotel with a darkroom for photo developing, a scale of justice to indicate the availability of a solicitor after an accident, and a U-shaped mark to show where a driver may descend into a pit and get under the car.

  In just over a decade there were Michelin guides and cartes not just for France but for large areas of Europe and beyond, cheering the motorist in Grande Bretagne, L’Espagne or Maroc towards engine oil and olive oil. The firm swiftly expanded into specialist maps, including, from 1917, unique Battleground Guides for pilgrimages to Verdun and elsewhere (marketed as un guide, un panorama, une histoire). And in the next war the maps served as an Allied tool, when the 1939 Michelin France was reprinted in Washington DC in 1944 and handed to the troops sweeping through Cherbourg and Bayeux as they liberated the country after D-Day.

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  With many Europeans too impoverished to venture abroad in the post-war period, the Americans began to re-invent tourism, armed with their own new guides. Chief among these were the series invented by Eugene Fodor and Arthur Frommer.

  Michelin’s numbered series – mapping France and beyond, and guiding the troops on D-Day.

  Frommer served as a GI in mid-1950s Europe, where he compiled a budget guide for his fellow soldiers, itself a bargain at 50 cents. When he was discharged he beefed up the handbook for civilians, and Europe on $5 a Day was born. His no-nonsense, no-rip-off mentality appealed particularly to fellow Americans setting foot in Europe for the first time, and the series has run to more than fifty editions (though the prices obviously kept rising: by 1994 Paris would cost you $45 a day, while by 1997 New York was $70).

  Eugene Fodor, born in Hungary, served in the war as an American soldier, although he had already written what he called his ‘Entertaining Travel Annual’ for Europe in 1936. His aim was twofold: to appeal to the American middle-classes with an eye on their purse, while also breezily expanding their cultural and historical horizons in a way he believed other guides were not – a less haughty, more flippant Murray for the ‘modern’ generation. But these new American guides, although much more informal than their Victorian-era, British predecessors, were in many ways far more conservative. They sent their readers on a narrowly-defined circuit of Europe, which comprised mainly the chief cities and sights. And their maps reflected this. The tinted, survey-style engravings of Murray or Baedeker, which you could have relied upon to ride across the continent, were replaced by crude sketches of city centres, noting the main attractions and hotels. All the art and detail of mapping had disappeared. It was as if guidebooks were ushering in a new dark age of cartography.

  And by the 1970s, Fodor and Frommer had in their turn become very mainstream institutions, out of touch with a new wave of popular travel that followed in the wake of the hippies. Suddenly there was mass tourism again in Europe, much of it on a shoestring – hitchhiking or on ‘InterRail’ passes – as well as an opening up of places like India and Thailand, Mexico and Peru. The new wave soon spawned its own travel guides: the Australian-based Lonely Planet, which arrived with an overland guide to South East Asia in 1974, and the Rough Guides, which began covering Europe in 1982.

  These two series presented a new attitude to tourism, although their readers would inevitably prefer to be thought of as travellers, and travellers with a conscience to boot. The guides were a little too efficient to be regarded as hippy, but they did have an authentic, back-to-the-earth mentality. Above all they would take you to parts of the world not yet spoilt by the other guides, and, if they were, would tell you where to go to meet like-minded travellers who wanted to do something about it (the first Rough Guide to Greece was dedicated to a non-nuclear future; eco-tourism is more the goal now.) They were written in a colloquial, chatty style, respectful of local customs but wary of officialdom, and their maps were reassuringly primitive. They were often hand-drawn out of necessity – both companies were shoestring operations in their early years and often the only map, say to a village in Nepal, was the one the guide’s researcher drew up on a napkin.

  As Lonely Planets and Rough Guides developed, however, alongside other rival series (including a plethora in Germany), a respect for mapping re-emerged. It was like watching Murrays and Baedekers all over again. Lonely Planet would feature 100 maps in its India guide, Rough Guides would introduce a further fifty to towns not p
reviously mapped since the Raj. In fact, as Rough Guides originator Mark Ellingham recalled, ‘we often used the old Murrays and Baedekers as our source material – nothing superior had been published since. It was just a question of adding new areas of the city and changing the street names. And, of course, introducing a rather different array of interests: local music clubs and bars and bike rental places, instead of the old Thomas Cook bureaux and poste restantes.’

  The original Rough Guide to Greece, complete with a dark age map on the front.

  The 1990s proved to be a golden age. Lonely Planet realised its aim to cover every country in the world, and did so in ever more detail and with growing sophisitication as digital mapping replaced hand-drawn, schematic plans. But the same digital mapping was also to hasten thir decline.

  Then as the new millennium began, the bubble burst. Suddenly, all the world’s information was available on the Internet and, emboldened by cheap flights, and travelling often just for a few days, travellers did their research themselves. You might still buy a Rough Guide for a trip to Peru or Morocco, but for a few days in Italy or a weekend in Hungary you found your hotel through TripAdvisor and printed out a Google map. Or perhaps you had that Google map on your phone, allowing you to see not just the location of your hotel or intended sights, but yourself, a dot moving slowly towards them. In such a new world, why would anyone buy a book that was out of date the moment it was published?

  But do we miss the graphite enchantment of those crinkly concertina engravings of Swiss mountains and Egyptian pyramids? I think we do.

  Pocket Map

  JM Barrie Fails to Fold a Pocket Map

  A map is not like a well-pleated skirt; it does not readily return to the folds intended for it when you bought it. This realisation came to J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, when he was twenty-nine, and not yet famous. And why value Barrie’s opinions on maps? Because he wrote the simplest and most enchanting map direction in the world: ‘Second to the right and straight on till morning.’

  That, at least, is how it appears in Barrie’s original play, first performed in 1904. When the Disney movie appeared in 1953, Peter’s directions had changed slightly (‘Second star to the right and straight on till morning’), and the studio also produced a map of Neverland (in associaton with Colgate) to chart the territory: Crocodile Creek, Pirate Cove, Skull Rock, and the rest. The thin paper map folded out to about 3ft by 2ft, and you needed three packs of soap and 15 cents to get one. It also had a heart-breaking inscription: ‘This map is a collector’s item of limited use.’

  The map is unlikely to have pleased the dramatist. In September 1889, long before Peter Pan took his inaugural flight, Barrie took against maps in general. He was living in Edinburgh when he noticed a trend in bookshops along Princes Street. An assistant would frequently offer him a new map of the city while tying up his purchases.

  The Colgate-Disney map of Neverland – tragically, ‘of limited use’.

  ‘Anything special about it?’ he would ask. ‘Well yes,’ the bookseller would reply. ‘It is very convenient for the pocket.’

  ‘At the words “convenient for the pocket” you ought to up with your books and run, for they are a danger signal,’ Barrie advised readers of the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch. ‘But you hesitate and are lost.’ Almost every house in Edinburgh contained a map that the whole family, working together, cannot shut, he went on. ‘What makes you buy it? In your heart you know you are only taking home a pocket of unhappiness.’ At the end of his diatribe, Barrie offers a list of negative advice born from terrible experience. This includes, ‘Don’t speak to the map’, ‘Don’t put your fist through it’, ‘Don’t kick it around the room’ and ‘Don’t blame your wife’. And if, by sheer fluke, you do succeed in folding the map, ‘don’t wave your arms in the air or go shouting all over the house “I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” If you behave in this way your elation will undo you, and no one will believe that you can do it again. Control yourself until you are alone.’

  Chapter 17

  Casablanca, Harry Potter and Where Jennifer Aniston Lives

  Here is a moment of cartographic joy from The Muppets, the 2011 nostalgia fest in which Kermit and friends get together for one last show to save their old theatre. As the frog drives across the United States, picking up old Muppets flung far and wide, a problem looms. Miss Piggy is working for Vogue in France, and they just don’t have the time or money to fly there from the US. But then Fozzie has an idea, something he’s seen in other films: ‘We should travel by map!’

  In the movies, travelling by map is the best way to travel. In The Muppets, Fozzie pushes a button on the car’s dashboard marked ‘Travel By Map’ and a map of the world appears before our eyes. We watch as a thick line moves across it to the required destination, and we are transported along with the line, from New York to Cannes, as smooth as mercury in a thermometer. There are no delays, no queues, no passport checks, no customs laws. There are no detours and no misdirections. The journey across the Atlantic takes only a few seconds, but it would have taken precisely the same time had it been state-to-state or city-to-next-door-city. Sometimes, in place of a map, a little aeroplane symbol tracks the route across the globe. Either way, we have changed scenes and locations in one of the oldest clichés known to the movies, the hoary rival to the wavy-line dream sequence. It is how some of us learn our geography.

  Trying to name the first cinematic journey by map is a fool’s errand, for there will inevitably be something obscure in the vaults, probably Russian.* But we can all name the most famous. In 1942 Michael Curtiz made Casablanca, a film about love, loyalty and escape that starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and cartography. Never before had maps played such a pervasive role in such a major film. From the opening titles to the end credits, and through several of the film’s key interior scenes, maps fill the screen with their lure and their possibility. But this being wartime, the maps also set harsh limits: the borders are closed, the distances greater, the exit visas hard to come by.

  The film opens with credits placed over a thick-lined map of Africa and the plodding blows of the Marseillaise. The map dissolves and is replaced by a globe spinning in clouds. ‘With the coming of the Second World War,’ the sonorous narration begins, ‘many eyes in imprisoned Europe turn hopefully, or desperately, to the freedom of the Americas.’ The earth still revolving, we zoom in over Europe, and at this point, closeup, the globe becomes a contour map – apparently Plasticine applied over a rubber ball. We hear that ‘Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so a tortuous roundabout refugee trail sprung up.’

  Casablanca – how some of us learnt our geography.

  The globe dissolves and we begin travelling by map. A heavy line marks our journey over land, a dotted one over sea. ‘Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran. Then by train or auto or foot across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco …’ Soon afterwards we are in the Moorish section of the city and Rick’s Café but maps continue to cast a symbolic shadow over many scenes, not least in Renault’s office as Rick and the officials moralise over the demands of love and the call of duty. And one of the greatest lines in romantic cinema (‘Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine’) suggests both the vastness of the spinning globe and our helplessness within it.

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  Most who watch Casablanca fall under its spell, and young film directors are no different. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series was his loving tribute to the Saturday afternoon heroes of his childhood, but it was inevitably influenced too by James Bond and cinematic Nazis. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens with an adventure from Indy’s youth, but for the first adult scene he’s in his Ivy League classroom, with maps of archaeo-logical digs on the wall and a nice thought for his doting students. ‘Forget any ideas you got about lost cities, exotic travel and digging up the world,’ Professor Jones tells them. ‘We do n
ot follow maps to buried treasure, and X never, ever marks the spot.’

  And then the viewer follows a map to buried treasure. We are off to find Sean Connery in plundered Venice, and we travel by map. We track a red line from New York, stop at St John’s for refuelling, cross the Atlantic, and hover over Spain to Italy. The map is superimposed over pictures of an airborne plane and Indiana turning pages of the Grail Diary. The Grail Diary has many maps of ancient sites, and we can vaguely make out the southern region of Judah by the Dead Sea, but before we can read it properly we are off again by cinematic map, this time a short red curl from Venice to Salzburg, where we have an overhead shot of a Nazi lair in a castle and another great movie cliché – people pushing counters on a vast table plan of Europe.

  The map and the globe have never gone out of style in the cinema. Unless you are making Strangers on a Train, Titanic or Snakes on a Plane, the process of travelling is usually a drag to watch, and is seldom shown in real time. These days the only choice for directors is whether to employ the device straight (Indiana Jones) or ironically (The Muppets)*. The issue has even attracted academic discourse, and in 2009 the Cartographic Journal devoted an entire issue to the subject. Some of this was heavy going (‘Applying the Theatre Metaphor to Integrated Media for Depicting Geography’) but one essay, by Sébastien Caquard of the University of Montreal, was startling. It suggested that a large proportion of the advances in digital cartography that we now take for granted – the zooming facility and shifts in perspective on digital maps, the layering of traditional maps with photographs and satellite views – all happened first in the movies, where the technology prefigured and inspired real-life cartographic possibility.