Some five million maps are housed in the Library of Congress. You’ll swear most of them are contained in its CARTOGRAPHIA: MAPPING CIVILIZATIONS, written by Vincent Virga. For map lovers like me, this elegant, oversized book is porn.
If your coffee table is crying out for one map book, this is the only one you need, containing full-color representations of maps from all eras and covering all points of the earth. The sheer scope of styles utilized by their creators is breathtaking and beautiful. You can keep your art books of famous paintings by the masters; I’ll take maps any day.
As Virga points out in his introduction, “A map is a dream, an idea, an action, an emblem of human endeavor.” Ronald E. Grim, the retired map curator from the Library of Congress, posits that each map tells a story, primarily about the culture in which they were created.
Older maps – and by “older,” I mean ancient – sometimes gave more weight to the art around the actual map, rendered in fine detail. But even the simple ones, such as those wordless wonders on clay tablets, hold tremendous visual appeal, as well as a window to our world’s past.
One of the more unique examples in CARTOGRAPHIA’s first section, “The Mediterranean World,” depict the world in the shape of a cloverleaf, while one contains a built-in working sundial and compass. A number of maps from this era, notes Virga, were based on religious principles.
“The Three-Part World” – that’s Asia, Africa and Europe, for the record – include an abstract Mongolian piece that looks like it was scrawled on graph paper, an Arabic World War II poster, an odd British woodcut of the human hand and a NASA satellite picture of the world that shows Americans use a helluva lot of electricity. Unsurprisingly, the Asian ones are among the most elaborate and gorgeous in the entire, 260ish-page book.
We’re represented in “The Fourth Part: The Americas.” Some of the more noteworthy works in this section include a rectangular survey of Knox County, Ill.; a diagram of a New Hampshire Quaker village; a Civil War-era cartoon map of the South; a map of New York City, colored according to race; and a 1930s panoramic view of the Boulder Dam. Also from that decade: a complete, unfolded Florida road map, which Virga notes in “uniquely iconic of the Anglo American civilization.”
“The Fifth Part: Oceania and Antarctica” opens with perhaps the most unusual piece: a Micronesian “stick chart.” It also shows off an upside-down world map, which has nothing on the curiosities in the terrific epilogue, “The Unseen Cultural World.” Here are pieces that “stimulate the imagination and record the living elements in societies.” This includes a 2001 blueprint of the human genome, a residential concentration of homosexuals, a 1976 cover of The New Yorker, William Faulkner’s annotated map of where things happened in his novels and a visualization of the Internet.
Fittingly, the final plate is a no-frills, black-and-white chart of the book stacks of the Library of Congress. CARTOGRAPHIA is the next best thing to actually going there. The book is a bit pricey – you can feel it in its weight – but that’s what the upcoming holiday season is for. –Rod Lott
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