For the Love of Maps: Foreword by Dava Sobel
Introduction: The Map That Wrote Itself
How the ancient Greeks – Eratosthenes and Ptolemy – first worked out the size and shape of the world and our place upon it.
The day Britain’s greatest cartographic treasure – the medieval Mappa Mundi – went to the auction houses to fix a leaky roof.
The world centres on Jerusalem – and the Poles appear.
4 Venice, China and a Trip to the Moon
How the Italians became the world’s greatest map makers, and then the Germans, and then the Dutch. And how a Venetian friar discovered the secrets of the East and ended up on the Moon.
Did Norse sailors really reach and map America before Columbus? Or is the world’s most curious map fakery’s finest hour?
In which Ptolemy reappears in Europe and America gets named after the wrong man.
7 What’s the Good of Mercator?
How the world looked in 1569 – and today, even if the UN still favours the Postel Azimuthal Equidistant.
In which the Atlas becomes a craze in seventeenth-century Holland, is adopted by The Times, and then turns to agit-prop.
9 Mapping a Cittee (without forder troble)
London gets the map bug, too, pioneers street mapping, and John Ogilby charts the course of every major road in Britannia.
10 Six Increasingly Coordinated Tales of the Ordnance Survey
Britain, spurred by Jacobite revolt, makes the Ordnance Survey, extending to India. But what is the symbol for a picnic site?
11 The Legendary Mountains of Kong
How an impassable mountain range spread and spread, until a French army officer found it wasn’t there.
12 Cholera and the Map that Stopped It
How mapping played its part in identifying the cause of the disease.
13 X Marks the Spot: Treasure Island
Treasure maps in literature and life.
14 The Worst Journey in the World to the Last Place to Be Mapped
How explorers found the South Pole without a map, and named the region after their families, friends and enemies.
The woman who reputedly walked 23,000 London streets may have walked considerably less.
16 Maps in All Our Hands: A Brief History of the Guidebook
The majestic fold-out engravings of Murray and Baedeker give way to another cartographic dark age.
17 Casablanca, Harry Potter and Where Jennifer Aniston Lives
In which the Muppets perfect travel by map and we stalk the stars.
18 How to Make a Very Big Globe
From scratch … when you used to run a bowling alley.
19 The Biggest Map Dealer, the Biggest Map Thief
How tempting are maps – and just what kind of dealers and thieves do they attract?
20 Driving Into Lakes: How Sat Nav Put the World in a Box
How we learnt to watch the dullest flight movie ever – and, with GPS, the Dutch once again took over the world’s mapping.
21 Pass Go and Proceed Direct to Skyrim
Maps as games, from jigsaw puzzles to Risk, and why computer games may be the future of cartography.
What taxi drivers have to offer the world of the neuroscientist.
Epilogue: The Instant, Always-On, Me-Mapping of Everywhere
How the Internet changed everything.