Continuing from the previous July postings about Simon Garfield's ode to maps, On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks (2013) I am listing personal maps that have stuck in my mind. As Simon writes, “when we gaze a map--any map, in any format from any era -- we still find nothing so much as history and ourselves.”
Globes Are Maps Too
Garfield dedicates a chapter to some famous globes, which are tricky to build because taking a flat, print representation of the Earth and covering a sphere is no easy task. One of the more famous efforts are the identical globes that were built for Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. The globes were gifts from Allied Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall (of The Marshall Plan).
You can still buy globes of this size and magnitude from London-based globemaker Peter Bellerby. Bellerby calls his updated replicas - The Churchill.
World's Largest Globe
Last summer, I visited world's largest globe known as The Eartha Globe in Yarmouth, Maine. Eartha dominates the atrium of the DeLorme, a maker of GPS software, satellite communication devices, maps and atlases. As you can see from my photo below, getting a shot of the entire globe from pole to pole is not doable with my camera. But you do get a sense, as globe affionados will tell you that, "The bigger the globe, the bigger the blank space in the Pacific."
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