Some types of book tip us backwards, towards innocent awe: large volumes with ornate illustrations and cross-section diagrams that show the reader ‘how’ and ‘why’; busy almanacs of world records, conspiracies and curiosities; and compendiums of cartoon strips with their ellipses promising danger and derring-do. But most seductive of all is the atlas.
This world between covers is gathered from the shelf when it suddenly becomes important to check where Chichester is. As eyes hover over England, they rest on Eastleigh, and then pick up the sure black squiggles of a railway branch line. That line is traced along the coast to Portsmouth, Brighton and Hastings, before a hop above Norfolk, Hull and Scarborough, each a flickering recollection of an incident, holiday, person or April afternoon, like cue cards teeing up sainted or hazy memories. To shake ourselves free and awaken elsewhere, atlas pages are shuffled and wafted onwards.
Sure lettering in the top right-hand corner announces, ‘Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany’. Such two-page spreads throb with detail and intrigue, a crowd of place names jostling for position and waving for attention. Light purple borders trickle freely, resembling the backs of old men’s hands, and blood-red roads dilly-dally across the page. In a City Plans section, the half-hexagon grids of Amsterdam, the prim and proper right angles of Toronto and the artful chaos of Paris sing of difference and contrary humanity. Future trips and adventures form as we look downwards and stalk our way across city and country. Some will one day turn to firm plots, dreams come true.
Onwards goes the tour of page and place. Over Murmansk or Pittsburgh, or in the hot-baked towns of Western Australia, lost in an atlas we ponder lives lived there. We picture people working, moving, kissing, striving; their existences mutually and emphatically unaware of ours, our worries or ambitions. Our fates shall never cross, but an atlas at least prompts a fanciful, longing glance. It turns us into novelists, choosing a place and conceiving a character, from the lonely cargo sailor skating along the pleasing blue of the Atlantic Ocean to the petrified climber lost among Andes mountain terracotta. Better still if yours is an old atlas, dripping with long-gone lands and old ideas, all contriving to conjure up another time in the imagination.
On fingertips we stroll across the world. The atlas allows the static mind to be broadened and opens access to secluded jungle rivers, glistening lakes and echoing airports. Its pages are laid with nourishing, unending detail that breathes into us the comfort of being part of something colossal. These are mesmeric sheets of fascination. Backwards we go.