Living Maps


Book Description

Venture to twenty-eight cities around the world in this colorfully illustrated collection of maps that take you on a journey through history, culture, and geography. On each page, you’ll visit a different city. And in each city, you’ll explore the metaphorical resonance between the physical metropolis and its inhabitants, history, and culture. In the hands of a creative cartographer, Manhattan is dissected in an anatomical diagram, the streets of Monaco trace the form of a Picasso nude, and the crisscrossing paths of boats on the Bosphorus become the nerves of Istanbul. Travel as you never have traveled before, and revel in the details that define urban life. By laying bare the bone, muscle, and sinew of twenty-eight cities, these maps reveal the unique spirit of each one and shed light on the strange and marvelous ways in which humans interact with the places they call home. Witty and insightful, this book will capture the imaginations of travelers, map enthusiasts, history buffs, and dreamers.







Atlas


Book Description

From the publication in 1595 of the first "atlas" by the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator, the term has become a universally adopted title for books containing accurate, uniform and evenly spread maps of all or some of the world. This is an atlas with a difference. Few of the maps in this book could reasonably be called "accurate" in the modern sense and could almost certainly not be used to plan a journey. Yet this atlas can help us to travel in a way that regular atlases do not, because by looking at old maps and getting to know their stories we can be transported back to the times in which they were made. The generous, full-color illustrations of each map in this large-format book range from the Klencke Atlas (1660) to Hokusai's map of China (1840-41), from a 1682 pirate map of Guatemala to 20th-century cartographic postcards featuring maps of Australia.