by Ian Sansom
This collaborative, hybrid form of digital/paper mapping has also been used successfully in disaster zones: in 2010 in the Pakistan floods, after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011, and currently in Haiti. Arguably there has been no enterprise quite like it since the English Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) produced its cheap maps for working people—sold for a shilling—in the early to mid-1800s, and even then there was of course no sense in which the readers of the SDUK maps were also the producers. The hierarchical model of geographical data collection and distribution may have changed, but paper still has a role to play in the digital era: machines may make maps, but machines still run on paper.
Between the first maps being drawn in the sand and the new Golden Age of Google and OSM neocartography there have been centuries of men and women making maps not only on paper but on just about any kind of material, including stone, wood, and in the famous case of Charlemagne, plates of solid silver. Everyone knows that the first printed map in the Western world appeared in a 1472 edition of the dictionary of St. Isidore of Seville, and everyone knows it was the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator who in the late sixteenth century began making maps using a projection based on latitude and longitude (the considerable advantage of which is that it makes navigation easier, the considerable disadvantage of which is that it makes Greenland look bigger than China, and Europe bigger than South America). But not everyone knows the story of Mercator’s contemporary, Abraham Ortels, of Antwerp—printer, bookseller, print dealer and “afsetter van carten,” decorator of maps—who was one of the first great entrepreneurial mapmakers, and who pipped Mercator to the post by creating the first modern paper atlas.
The story goes that sometime in the mid-1500s a rich Antwerp merchant was complaining to a friend about the state of contemporary maps: the big ones were too large and unwieldy, the small ones could hardly be read at all. How big were the big ones? They were enormous. Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographiae Descriptio in Plano, for example, published to accompany his Cosmographiae Introductio (1507)—which was, incidentally, the first map to bear the word “America”—was printed on multiple sheets that, pasted together, would make a map of about thirty-six square feet. These days, algorithms are used in the design and folding of large maps, and these methods have in turn been used to develop three-dimensional objects that can be folded from flat sheets, with both flat-pack furniture and production-line car parts evolving from the mathematical rules for folding paper. But in sixteenth-century Antwerp there was no flat-pack furniture and there were no handy algorithms, so the merchant’s friend mentioned his complaint to a gifted young map illuminator, Abraham Ortels—known as Ortelius—to see if he could assist. Ortelius made up a volume of about thirty maps for the merchant, sensible and uniform in size, and being young and ambitious, he realized that there was more in this than just a one-off commission: this was his big opportunity. He began collecting and editing more maps, and engraving plates of his own, and had them printed and bound, and after a mere ten years of hard work, on May 20, 1570, the first edition of the first modern atlas was published. Its title: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theater of the World); seventy maps on fifty-three copper-plate printed sheets, thirty-five pages of text, price 6fl 10st. The Theatrum was really an amazing piece of art—Ortelius was friends with Peter Brueghel the Elder and was an early collector of the work of Dürer—but it was also profoundly practical. Portable, readable, reliable, affordable. A second edition was produced within three months, a Dutch edition in 1571, with other editions and supplements soon to follow: scholars have estimated total sales of around 7,750 copies of the full atlas in its first few years of publication. The first edition of Mercator’s combined atlas—incorporating all his maps—wasn’t published until 1602, and although it soon eclipsed the Theatrum in popularity, Ortelius had got there first: the Theatrum is organized entirely as a modern atlas might be organized, beginning with a map of the world and continuing with maps of the continents, and then of various countries.
What followed this sixteenth-century revolution in mapping and map technology, in the words of Lloyd A. Brown, in The Story of Maps (1950), was “the greatest real estate venture of all time.” During the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paper maps allowed groups and individuals not only to navigate, but also, crucially, to make plans for navigations and adventures, both great and small. What’s true for countries is true also for country estates. Lancelot “Capability” Brown, for example, was so called because he could see the capabilities in a landscape; he could read it like a document, or a map. Explaining his method of garden design, Hannah More famously recounted how Brown would point a finger and announce, “ ‘I make a comma and there,’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’ ” Using maps and surveys, estates could be managed, trees planted, and grand visions and ideas put into practice.
Over the past five hundred years, paper has helped to create and define landscapes, peoples and nations. Maps have assisted and determined the colonial and military explorations of the Dutch and the French, the commercial activities of the British East India Company, and countless other enterprises. (And as with space, so time was also colonized using paper, in the form of timelines, timetables, astronomical charts, genealogies and succession lists—among the most famous and elaborate of which is the massive triumphal arch, the Ehrenpforte, designed on paper by Dürer for Maximilian I around 1516, which consists of forty-five giant folded plates.) At home as well as abroad, maps defined and legitimated places: rulers who could literally see and grasp their territories could define and defend them. The work of the Ordnance Survey, for example, begun in 1791, was a survey for the British Board of Ordnance, undertaken following the successful use of maps in the Scottish Highlands after the crushing of the Jacobite rebellion at Culloden in 1746. But it’s not all bad news. It’s not all about subjugation. If a map is a visual statement and argument about the world and our place in it—announcing both “I am here” and “You are there”—it can be used for good as well as for ill.
In the nineteenth century, Charles Booth famously used maps to illustrate his campaigning work on behalf of the London poor, with his street maps with their seven-color system, from black, “inhabited principally by occasional labourers, loafers, and semi-criminals,” to yellow, inhabited by wealthy families who kept “three or more servants.” (My own family, I note, are from the black streets.) In the 1970s, Stuart McArthur’s upside-down “Universal Corrective Map of the World,” which shows Australia on top, became a form of national self-assertion, and the famous Peters projection, which shows all countries and continents with their relative sizes maintained, unlike Mercator’s projection, became a challenge not just to cartographers but to the international community: now that you can see the size of Africa, what are you going to do about it? In J. H. Andrews’s pithy summation, in Maps in Those Days: Cartographic Methods Before 1850 (2009), “Maps express beliefs about the surface of the earth”—and, one would want to add, its inhabitants. When HMS Beagle set out from England on December 27, 1831, with a young naturalist named Charles Robert Darwin along for the ride, it was on a cartographic mission, its aim to chart South American coastlines: it returned five years later with the beginnings of a new map of human civilization.
The map historian R. A. Skelton summarizes the power and role of maps thus: “In the political field, maps served for the demarcation of frontiers; in the economic, for property assessment and taxation, and (eventually) as an inventory of national resources; in administration, for communications in military affairs, for both strategic and military planning, offensive and defensive.” Maps are an integral part of that vast substrata of paper that underpins and still underlies the modern world, a system, in the words of the radical geographer Denis Wood, that includes
“codes, laws, ledgers, contracts, treaties, indices, covenants, deals, agreements.” Modernity was created by, sustained by, and remains saturated in paper.
Smothered by it also. One of the traditional challenges of mapping is how to represent that which is basically a sphere on a flat surface, an example of the perennial and troubling problem of the relationship between any object and its representation. In 1931 the philosopher Alfred Korzybski delivered a paper, “A Non-Aristotelian System and Its Necessity for Rigor in Mathematics and Physics,” at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he remarked that “a map is not the territory.” But what if it were? What if a map were so accurate that it was the territory? What if the representation were perfect? In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), a cartography-obsessed empire produces a 1:1 map, but then, over time, “Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome.” The giant map is left to rot, though fragments of it are to be found sheltering “an occasional Beast or beggar.” We are Borges’s beasts and beggars still, for all the advances in digital technology, still wrapping ourselves in paper and its representations, still struggling to distinguish between maps and the territory, still hoping against hope that our paper guide has strong folding properties, is water repellent, abrasion resistant, and will sit sturdily in the hand on a long journey. Or perhaps that’s only me.
The Iron Curtain
4
Victims to the BIBLIOMANIA!
We will now, my dear Sir, begin “making out the catalogue” of victims to the BIBLIOMANIA!
REV. THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN,
Bibliomania, or Book-madness; containing some account of the history, symptoms, and cure of this fatal disease (1809)
Handmade comb-marbled paper by Ann Muir
A page from Gutenberg’s forty-two-line Bible
At the beginning of his famous novel The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs includes what he calls a “deposition: a testimony concerning a sickness” (my copy of the book, a nice tight hardback, with original dust jacket, published by John Calder, was bought secondhand from an old junk shop in Chelmsford that I used to visit with school friends on weekends in search of cheap paperback Beats, and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, and the Picador Richard Brautigan, and Borges, and Philip K. Dick). Burroughs is writing about his fifteen-year addiction to “junk”—opium and all of its derivatives, including morphine, heroin, Eukodol, Pantopon, Demerol, Palfium and a whole load of other stuff that he had variously smoked, eaten, sniffed, injected and inserted. “Junk,” Burroughs writes, “is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy . . . The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product . . . The addict . . . needs more and more junk to maintain a human form . . . [to] buy off the Monkey.”
The chances are, if you are reading this book, you are no better or worse than William S. Burroughs. The chances are, you have a serious problem: you’re an addict. You have been sold to a product. You have a monkey on your back. And that monkey is made of paper.
(But it’s OK. You are not alone. Here’s where I’m at: I am wearing a pair of dirty, brown, broken slip-on boots that my sister bought for me about ten years ago; in both boots the sole is split right across the middle, and I have attempted to fix them with Super Glue. I have two other pairs of shoes, but they too are broken, too broken in fact for me to be able to patch up, and they have therefore required professional attention and are currently awaiting collection from the excellent boot and shoe repair shop—motto, “Shoes Good Enough to Wear Are Good Enough to Mend”—just off Botanic Avenue in Belfast. I am wearing one of the shirts that the father of a friend of mine kindly sent me a few years ago, when he’d retired and was throwing out all his old work clothes and buying leisurewear. All of the shirts are made of a drip-dry nylon—Alagon—of a kind now unavailable for reasons not at all clear to me; you get used to the rashes after a while, and the benefit of not having to iron the shirts surely outweighs any slight skin complaint the material may cause. My trousers are one of the two wearable pairs that I’m currently running, and they’re in pretty good condition, although they are covered in green paint from a couple of summers ago when I was painting the shed where I work in the garden. My jacket is circa 1990. And I am standing in the War on Want bookshop, down at the other end of Botanic Avenue, ostensibly on my way home from work, and I have half a dozen books in my arms, and I know that if I blow all of my spending money on these books I won’t be able to get my shoes back from the cobbler, and I’ll have to leave them there another week. They’ve already been in for a month, and the proprietor of the shop has started leaving messages for me on my answering machine. I have a decision to make. I buy the books. For the foreseeable future I shall continue to be dressing like a vaudeville comedian, or a character in a play by Samuel Beckett.)
The first documented use of the word “bibliomania,” according to my OED—the twenty-volume second edition, bought as a present to myself when I received the advance on my first novel, and which cost me the advance on my first novel, which meant effectively that I wrote a book to buy a book—was in 1734, in the Diary of Thomas Hearne, bibliognost, antiquarian and assistant keeper of books at the Bodleian. “I should have been tempted,” writes Hearne, “to have laid out a pretty deal of money without thinking my self at all touched with Bibliomania.” Then in 1750 Lord Chesterfield writes, warning his son, “Beware of the Bibliomanie.” But the word doesn’t appear to come into popular usage until 1809, when the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin publishes his book Bibliomania, or Book-madness; containing some account of the history, symptoms, and cure of this fatal disease. The disease, in Dibdin’s wild, medico-rhapsodico account, manifests itself in a desire for first editions, uncut copies, illustrated copies, and a “general desire for Black Letter.” Book madness, in Dibdin’s diagnosis, is a paper-borne disease.
Yes, of course there were books before paper. As every schoolboy knows, for the first few thousand years or so of its existence, a “book” might have been a clay tablet or a roll of papyrus, and it wasn’t until the coming together of three key components—ink, type and paper—in the giant technological leap forward that was the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in about 1450, that the book as we know it took off and took over. Nicole Howard describes the role of paper in the Gutenberg printing process in The Book: The Life Story of a Technology (2005):
When ready for a new job, the printer would order the requisite amount of paper from a warehouse. It would arrive in stacks, or tokens, of 250 sheets. The night before printing began, the approximate number of sheets needed for the job were wet down and then stacked upon each other. The weight of the stack squeezed out much of the water, resulting in slightly damp sheets the next day. The moistness allowed the fibers of the paper to receive the ink in a way they would not, were they completely dry.
Taken individually from the stacks, the sheets were placed in the tympan. The frisket was then swung into place to cover the paper’s margins, and then the whole unit slid beneath the platen. With a pressman’s turn of the screw, the type—which had been inked with special leather pads—transferred the image to the paper. With the impression complete, the paper was removed from the press and hung to dry in the rafters of the shop.
And—hey presto!—welcome to the modern world. Books produced by this sort of method have been accorded responsibility by historians for everything from the scientific revolution to the Protestant Reformation, to the collapse of the ancien régime in France, to the rise of capitalism and the fall of communism, and just about anything and everything in between. Books, as we know, transmit ideas, foment and ferment strong feelings, prop up and bring down governments, offer escape and enlightenment, and encourage variously greed, hate, love, self-love and self-help:
basically, books make history, and are made by history. And books, lest we forget, are made from paper.
In fact, from Gutenberg on, we have come to identify books so closely with paper that it’s nigh on impossible for us to divorce our idea of the book from its long-standing relationship with paper: they’re a couple; it’s the perfect marriage. Even now, after a brief, fun flirtation with the dynamics of hypertextuality back in the late 1980s and 1990s, e-books and their associated reading devices have come increasingly to resemble paper books in almost every regard: in their shape, size, feel and functionality. Prophets and opponents of the new technologies continually insist that e-books are amazingly, shockingly, mind-alteringly, paradigmatically different from p-books, when in fact the truth is that they are drearily similar. All we need is an e-book reader that actually smells like paper—the I Can’t Believe It’s Not Paper Reader™—and the impersonation of old books by new books will be complete. Paper books, a mere mechanism for conveying information, have become so closely identified with the information they convey that we have difficulty in believing that anything else really is a book. A young novelist recently told me that she was dissatisfied with the e-book deal her agent had secured for her because “It isn’t the same as a real book deal” (not the same, that is, except for the pitiful advance, the risible royalties, the virtually nonexistent marketing and distribution and the handsome 15 percent paid to the agent; no wonder so many aspiring authors are flocking to Kindle direct publishing).