LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Simon Garfield excels in getting a quart into a pint pot, cramming the history of maps into a very readable one volume history. From picturing the universe to the London Underground, from the map’s role in exploration and politics, in imperial expansion, mythology and disease he shows how we rely on maps to show us everything from our place in the universe to finding our way round the London Underground, to exposing disease, furthering imperial expansion or just to tell lies either through ignorance or political expedience.
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The Lovereading view...
Packed with interesting facts, written in an incredibly accessible style this book is simply amazing. From early attempts to map the world, where strangely East was at the top of some maps (hence the term Orient yourself), to a map of the world created by Facebook connections Simon Garfield shows how maps and map making have been central to human knowledge and development.
Sue Baker
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About
On the Map Why the World Looks the Way it Does Synopsis
From Mappa Mundi to Myst - the bestselling Just My Type author turns his gaze to maps. Maps have the most amazing stories - and Simon Garfield is the perfect author to tell them. This is a book that will inspire mapophiles but engage even those of us who stare blankly at an OS pathfinder's hieroglyphs. Just as Garfield found the magic in fonts, here he creates compelling narratives on everything from the challenge of mapping the oceans tospellbinding treasure maps to the naming of America, from Churchill's crucial war maps to the lay-out of a Monopoly board, from crime maps to music maps, from rare map dealers to cartographic frauds. En route, there are 'map-break' tales on Michelin and railway maps, how to fold a map maps of places that never existed, a London A-Z from 1677 and the weirdness of videogame mapping. On The Map will explain where we've been, how we got there and where we're going.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9781846685101 |
| Publication date: |
5th September 2013 |
| Author: |
Simon Garfield |
| Publisher: |
Profile Books Ltd |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
464 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Non-Fiction Books of the Month
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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Press Reviews
Simon Garfield Press Reviews
'Every so often someone writes a book about an obscure subject and uses it to illuminate the rest of the world... this is one of the best'
(William Leith, Evening Standard)
'After being walked through these stories, it's difficult to even look at a cereal packet in the same way again
(Observer)
'This is a smart, funny, accessible book that does for typography what Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation'
(New York Times)
Author
About Simon Garfield
Simon Garfield was our Guest Editor in October 2012 - click here - to see the books that inspired his writing.
Simon Garfield is the author of fourteen acclaimed books of non-fiction including On the Map, Just My Type and The Wrestling. His edited diaries from the Mass Observation Archive, Our Hidden Lives, We Are At War and Private Battles, were bestsellers, and his study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. He lives in London and St Ives, Cornwall.
Author photo © Sarah Lee
More About Simon Garfield
