Category — Books

C-SPAN’s Book T.V. has video about author Vincent Virga’s book Cartographica: Mapping Civilizations.

The author worked for eight years with the staff of the Library of Congress to create this book on the history of maps and how they reveal civilizations.

The video provides “an exclusive look inside the “treasures vault” of the Library of Congress Geography and Map division to examine and learn more about their holdings and some of the maps included in the book.”

Via: MapHist

In his article yesterday in the New York Times, “From the Glove Compartment to the Shelf“, William Grimes goes over several recent books centred around antique maps and cartography, (including the aforementioned Vincent Virga’s “Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations”.) Grimes notes how maps have “a strange charisma unrelated to practical value.”

The strange appeal of maps may have something to do with the recent “surge” in books on cartography. In addition to Virga’s book, other books covered in the article include Mark Ovenden’s “Transit Maps of the World,” “The Mapmaker’s Opera,” by Béa Gonzalez, “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,” the catalog for a current exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

I just read an interview with Vincent Virga, author of Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, a new annotated compendium highlighting the Library of Congress’s vast array of maps dating from ancient Babylonia all the way up to 21st-century Europe. Virga states that each map included in his new book had to tell us something about the culture from which it originated.

Mary Sponberg Pedley, an expert in French cartography of the 17th and 18th centuries, and author of “The Commerce of Cartography: Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” a book that provides a picture of the costs and profits of the mapmaking industry in England and France, and reveals how the economics of map trade affected the content and appearance of maps, will give the first annual David Woodward Memorial Lecture on Saturday, Nov. 4 at 5 p.m. at the Glickman Family Library (Osher Map Library) on the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Mary Sponberg Pedley is an adjunct assistant curator of maps in the William M. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the associate editor of Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography.

[tags]Antique Maps, Cartographic History, Cartography Lectures, 18th Century French Cartography[/tags]

Yesterday, CCAer of the CCA Blog reviewed: Terra Nostra 1550 – 1950: The Stories Behind Canada’s Maps by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) employee Jeffrey S. Murray. According to CCAer, Murray does not simply focus on the highlights of the LAC’s 1.5 million map holdings, but instead:

…takes a moderately successful approach to highlighting the holdings of Library and Archives Canada by looking at time periods and trends.

The book has four broad areas of focus which he entitles “Envisioning Canada,” “Perfecting Our Cities,” “Finding Our Way,” and “Scaling the Landscape.” Each of these areas is further subdivided into more specific chapters that look at a specific type of mapping or period in Canada’s cartographic history. By doing so, Murray provides a light but interesting sketch of history of mapping in Canada.

CCAer does not appear to be overly impressed with the book, nor with the fact that Murray only covers mapmaking up until 1950. (Just a guess, but perhaps the focus of the book was more on antique maps and antique mapmaking techniques? Or maybe 400 years was just a nice round number?) Still, if I had a xmas stocking, I would like this book to be in it, then I could judge for myself.

[tags]Antique Maps, Antique Map Books, Cartography, Cartographic History[/tags]

Another book on antique map collecting that appears to be an essential and excellent introduction to the world of map collecting is Francis J. Manasek’s Collecting Old Maps. From Antiquaries Manasek:

Filled with data, reference information, and hundreds of illustrations, the book will also be useful to advanced collectors, dealers, and institutional curators. It will introduce a beginner to this fascinating hobby with all the information needed to get started and make sense of many difficult aspects of collecting. Price, condition, identifying, buying and selling at auction, conservation and repair, are but some of the topics covered.

Reviewers at Amazon seem to concur.

[tags]Antique Map Collecting, Map Books[/tags]