The Book Shopper

New Mexico Map Shopping

Except for a quick browse of the Maya Jones Books stall in the El Museo Cultural Market adjacent the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, I did very little book shopping on my recent trip to Santa Fe with my partner Denise and her brother and sister-in-law Mike and Kathy Koslow. (“Excuse me, sir, do you have any margarita recipe books?”)

But other printed matter came into play—maps. And appropriately so, since we road tripped through Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch up Highway 84 in a geological tour or rock formations.  I had no idea what they were about until I purchased the exquisitely printed Abiquiu: The Geologic History of O’Keefe Country by Kirt Kempter and Dick Huelster. The detailed map gives a rundown of the rock formations, the type of rock, a timeline and explanation of how the topography was formed.

Here's an excerpt about the formation near Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch (shown at the top of the post):

"The Mesozoic Era is represented by the sedentary deposits that surround Ghost Ranch. The basal, mostly red mudstones represent the Triassic Petrified Forest Formation, when broad rivers meandered across a flat landscape in northern New Mexico. The orange-red to yellow overlying cliffs represent the Entrada Formation, petrified sand dunes from the Jurassic Period approximately 165-160 million years ago."

Well, it’s not exactly the map you can follow while you are hiking but it serves well as a memory of what we experienced, not unlike this photograph of us trekking through a slot canyon near the Cerrito Blanco.

 

Airplane Reading

This month I have made roundtrip plane trips from Atlanta to Berlin and then Atlanta to Los Angeles. Proper reading material is always a critical decision because it can make the difference between a tolerable flight or a miserable flight. 

I never trust the entertainment consoles. They may not work (as mine didn't) or they are populated with content that you didn't bother to watch at home. Even if you are interested in one of the inflight movies you will need your magnifying eyewear and a better set of earphones than the airline has provided. (I guess I am supposed to bring my own computer and content...)

The reason I bring this up is that I had the good fortune to hit pay dirt when I brought German author and graphic artist Judith Schalansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Island I Have Not Visited and Never Will (2009) with me on the  four hour+ flight from LA to Atlanta.

The book practically fits in your back pocket and can share space your gin and tonic on the wobbly tray table. But the book also takes you to other places far away from the crowded cabin.  Schalansky credits the idea when she surveyed a giant globe in the Berlin National Library and began studying the tiny islands names that dot the blue expanses of the ocean.  First she collected the facts including their longitude and latitude coordinates, their current population (if any), a timeline of major events and their distance to nearby continents or other remote islands. Some you may have heard of such places as Easter Island, Iwo Jima, or Christmas Island but she gives equal billing to some uninhabited ones like Deception Island (near Antarctica), Bouvet Island (in the South Atlantic) or the cold and barren Lonely Island (near the Arctic Circle). 

She dedicates four pages to each entry/chapter. The first two pages provides the facts and the timeline and a detailed map including points of interest such as elevation, bays and any villages. Pages 3 and 4 are very short essays about the history or geological/biological makeup of the place such as the Pacific isle of Banaba, which is made up entirely of phosphate from centuries of bird guano buildup. Schalansky's writing style has been aptly  described in The Paris Review " as a prose poem of sorts. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction; we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation."

What makes it special for airline travelers is that when reading about hardships like near starvation, or freezing to death while discovering these often hostile piles of volcanic rock, you don't feel so angry when the flight attendant ignores your request to reset your entertainment console. How can you complain? What also makes the book ideal in a plane setting is that my attention span often wanes during the flight, (I'm always checking other passengers viewing habits.) With just four pages per chapter if  you start to drift you can easily refocus and return to these compelling stories. 

Once you've reached your final destination, and you are greeted with a "How was your trip?" Instead of ranting about the hideous coffee, the sloppy mask wearing of the traveler across the aisle, or the sticky bathroom floors, you can quote Schalansky instead:

"There is no untouched garden of Eden lying at this never-ending globe. Instead, human beings traveling far and wide have turned into the very monsters they chased off the maps." 

Something to discuss while you wait for your luggage.

---

When you purchase a book through our companion site (destinationbooks.net) we earn an affiliate commission.

Barely Maps: A Cyclist's Sojourn

On my companion blog Down & Outbound, I posted a note last fall about my contribution to a Kickstarter project entitled Barely Maps. The project is a personal account of cyclist and graphic designer Peter Gorman's 11,000 mile bike trip across the United States and southern Canada. A signed copy of Barely Maps 100 Minimalist Maps arrived at my door after Christmas including a personal thank you note for being an investor.

The book is gorgeously printed like an artbook with dozens of illustrations including a set of Intersections, where Gorman outlines the quirky, weird intersections of select U.S. cities.  Even though Intersections is a popular aspect of Gorman's work (single city posters are available at barelymaps.com) the book is much more. Writes Gorman, "It seemed important to make sense of the trip and what it was all about. I thought it would help to create something, so I opened a blank white page on my computer and started drawing." The result is a series of illustrated memoir-vignettes about his travels and his life before and after the trip.

All images courtesy of Peter Gorman

Gorman's transcontinental  bike trip dominates the first section of the book (Maps numbering #1 to #25) . Gorman writes only briefly about the places he visits, preferring to  rely on "maps" or more illustrative representations of places (The Great Lakes, Savannah, the Pacific Coast Highway). Some of  his efforts work better for me than others. but I will admit, I was hoping  something similar to Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983).  My misguided expectation that everything should match Charles Joseph Minard's "Napoleon's March to Moscow" falls on me. Once I put that aside, I could appreciate Gorman's creativity much more.

Part 2 is Intersections which covers 25 maps of intersections of major cities (Maps #26 to #50 although you have to figure that out for yourself). But based on his depiction of Atlanta I appreciate that all metropolises have street oddities that we view with both pride and loathing. One possible shortcoming is whether the reader will care about the petroglyph-like intersections from other cities.

The final two sections of the book Part 3 After (maps #51 to #75)  and Part 4 Before (maps #76 to #100) Gorman concentrates on the aftermath of his trip where he spent considerable time in Seattle (#51 to #64). About 80% of the maps in the Before section are dedicated to Gorman's childhood in upstate New York ---  his early memories of spinning globes in the classroom and riding his bike on his paper route in Syracuse. Included with these illustrations are short paragraphs explaining the significance of how maps have always been an integral part of his life. 

Because the last two sections are heavily Seattle and Syracuse centric, they don't work as well as the first section (unless you hail from those two cities). Nonetheless as one who designed and wrote his own book out of an obsession (Down & Outbound: A Mass Transit Satire ) I understand Gorman's need to create and illustrate the book his way.

I will enjoy showing this interesting, quirky book to people at my next Destination: Books popup and I know Gorman is planning another creative endeavor in March of 2020 called Blue Atlas.  Long may he ride.

 

In Praise of Essays and Essayists

Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. – Jonathan Franzen

Admittedly, I haven’t been writing any essays lately (with one exception), but I have been reading some good ones and recently watched the Netflix documentary on the writer Joan Didion. Here’s a quick rundown:

 Jonathan Franzen*

Jonathan Franzen’s “Is It Too Late to Save the World” in The Guardian (November 7, 2017) Albeit rambling and containing enough material for three pieces (the role of essays in the social media world, climate change and birding in Ghana during the 2016 election) you can be sure that Franzen’s take on events is personal, insightful, and misanthropic in tone.  Franzen’s collection How to Be Alone (2002) is one of my favorite collections of essays.

Rebecca Solnit

In preparation for an upcoming visit to New Orleans, I just finished reading Rebecca Solnit’s  Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (2013) that she co-edited with documentary filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker. This book is a series of essays and corresponding maps about the Crescent City and I read it in part because I am preparing for a trip there before the end of the year. Regular readers of this blog know that I have been a longtime admirer of Solnit’s work. (Just type her name in the search bar and look out!) She recently posted a piece in The Guardian too. “One Year On, Donald Trump Is Still an Illegitimate President” does points out how the system is in place to disenfranchise millions of voters and the perils of social media with respect to future elections as well.

And one other note, Unfathomable City makes another sobering note in the wake of the natural disasters in Florida, Houston, and Puerto Rico.  If Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005 (and then followed by the BP oil spill in 2010) is any indication, please note recoveries can take years and forever change a place’s self-identity. (Saying "Be Strong" isn't going to be enough.) The map from the book shown above is entitled: "Oil and Water: Extracting Petroleum and Exterminating Nature."

Joan Didion*

Netflix has recently released a documentary on essayist Joan Didion entitled “The Center Will Not Hold”, which was directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne.  I have been reading Joan Didion since my senior seminar on New Journalism in college in the 1970s and I can recall one my fellow students writing her thesis on Didion and imitating Didion’s dry, detached narrative style, which comes across in the film as well.  (I opted for a Thomas Pynchon writing style in college– a bad choice which set me back 20 years as a writer.) The film mentions three of her books in detail: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979) and her book The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) on grief surrounding the death of her husband the writer John Gregory Dunne.

I am still that surprised me is that anyone would do a film about an essayist. Who’s next? Wilfred Sheed*?

 

*Brief anecdotes about Franzen and Didion appear in my The Bookshopper: A Life in Review (2009), but there is nothing about Sheed who is a fine essayist.

Related articles

Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold, is a captivating documentary on her life and work.

(Frisco) Maps I Love #5

I have another entry for my Maps I Love Collection, a series of blog postings celebrating maps that display in imaginative ways where we are and where we have been. The new addition is Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (2010), a gorgeously published book by the University of California Press.

I have only been to San Francisco a couple of times and that was decades ago, but that matters little because Solnit's collaborative effort – where she enlists the help of other writers along with cartographers and artists – is more about our relationships to a place than a simple Rand McNally travel guide. Solnit summarizes her atlas in the Acknowledgements as a “valentine of sorts to a complex place...one that tries to see the place whole, with its toxic sites and crimes and tragedies as well as its treasures and cultures.”

Using variations of 22 maps of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area, Solnit and her co-creators deftly juxtapose seemingly disparate subjects: Culinary landmarks with toxic sites, murder statistics with locations of Monterrey Cypresses, butterflies and the gay population (both “come out,” so to speak) or the locations of the area's shipyards and its rich musical heritage, both heavily influenced by the great Southern black migration of World War II that supplied the labor for the building of navy vessels at the rate of one a day. (The Joshua Jelly-Schapiro essay begins with the Otis Redding lyric from “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”: I left my home in Georgia/Headed for the 'Frisco Bay). Other essays focus on a particular district like the Mission or Fillmore neighborhoods or more singular subjects like the importance of coffee or a tour of film sites via Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

After you have finished savoring this book, which deserves to be read slowly and thoughtfully, you feel like you have been living for decades in San Francisco. And you also wonder, “Doesn't every place deserve such a bittersweet love song?”

 

Historical Atlas on Display

For those of you who either a.) appreciate old books, b.) like maps,  c.) relish fine printing, or d) all of the above, make an effort to see the Joan Blaeu's Grooten Atlas, first published in the Netherlands in 1662-1665.

The Grooten Atlas along with framed prints are currently on display at the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking on the campus of Georgia Tech University in Atlanta. Here's the press release from the Museum:

"Georgia Tech’s Price Gilbert Memorial Library and the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking proudly exhibit Joan Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas from February 27 to June 26, 2015.  Also called the Atlas major, the atlas was published in Amsterdam between 1662-1665.  Blaeu’s nine volume atlas remains the foremost European Atlas published in the seventeenth century.  These works are familiar to some faculty and students, but the larger community has been unaware that Georgia Tech has these treasures in the rare book collection.  This particular edition is one of the few remaining hand-colored, gold-embossed deluxe editions of the Atlas, bound in Moroccan leather.  Original volumes of the Atlas will be on exhibit along with reproductions of select maps from the collection. 

Exhibited maps include European views of Africa, the Americas and Asia, depicting important trade routes and ports.  Detailed views of European cities and countries provide insight into a continent developing the geopolitical regions known today.  The Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking map of Virginia and Florida will also be featured in the exhibit.                 

Explore how the Grooten Atlas came to be produced in 1660s Amsterdam, the culmination of years of research, the development of papermaking and printmaking, and the establishment of the art of map making.  Joan Blaeu, a second-generation mapmaker, celebrates the work of Tycho Brahe, mentor to Blaeu’s father. Brahe’s study of astronomy and contributions to celestial navigation provide a solid foundation to the development of the Atlases.                  

Considered together, the Blaeu’s Grooten Atlas provides important examples of evolving cartographic technologies and rich material exploring the idea of Europe after the Thirty Years War."

Be mindful of the hours since the museum keeps more "business hours" 9-5, Monday to Friday.  But there is free, easy access parking in front of the museum on 10th Street, which is important if you ever tried to park near there.  Admission is free but the museum appreciates  donations. Here's a few more marginal photos of the exhibit that should not preempt you from attending.

One of the Many Walls of Maps

 

Tools of Cartography

 

Maps I Love #4

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.”

Mercator vs. Peters-Gall

Similiar to making globes representing the spherical Earth on a flat piece of paper presents it's problems. As a youth, our classrooms were always decorated with the Mercator World Map, which at that time seemed to be the map standard. Little did I know that it was based on the work of Gerardus Mercatur (1512-1594) who addressed the sphere problem by bowing the lines at a certain degree. This somewhat distorted the map into making it European and Greenland centric and de-emphasing South America and Africa. Or course, I didn't know this. I kept thinking, "Greenland is damn big."

Then came along Arno Peters (1916-2002)  in the 1970s who claimed that his Peters Projection map developed along with James Gall was more accurate portrayal of size of land masses even though the masses themselves are distorted. I keep a Peters Map on my cube wall and it never fails to elicit a response of bewilderment even though this interpertation of the world has been around a long time.

Of course I am always trying really trying get quizzical looks from my cube visitors, so I keep my Jasper Johns print of the United States (a sorry example of museum impulse buying) pinned to my wall . It doesn't have any thing "useful" like state capitals or highways, but it is colorful.

 

Maps I Love #3

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."

Maps I Love #2

Continuing from the previous posting 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.”

Transit Maps

Garfield dedicates a chapter to Harry Beck (1902 - 1974) the London Underground draughtsman who redesigned the London Tube map in the 1930s. Beck's now famous "electrical circuit" design does not reflect it's actual geographic scale between London stations, but organizes and represents the stations such that makes it much easier for commuters to navigate on the Underground. Below is one of the early iterations.

T-Shirt Maps

Regular readers know that this blog is the virtual home of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) Book Club, (see the category list on the right for all the postings about it), and public transportation has long been an interest of mine that extends beyond Atlanta. Visiting Boston, I am always impressed with the Boston T, so much that I used to have shower curtain of the transit map (before it distingrated in mold). I still have a couple T-shirts with the map. Notice the same Beck-like design on the shirt.

When I wear them around Atlanta,  I get comments ranging from "I wish we had better public transportation" or "Why don't you just live in Boston, if you love it so much?"

 

Maps I Love

 

I just finished reading Simon Garfield's ode to maps, On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks (2013) that covers everything maps, ranging Babylonian clay tablets dating from 600 B.C. to the latest innovations from Google. As I read, I started reminscing about personal memories of all maps I have that 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.”

For next few postings I will share some of my favorites and why:

The Battle of Nashville Map

This map of the Battle of Nashville came from the attic of my grandmother who was on the board of her local library. Apparently, the library was going to pitch some of these old Civil War battlefield maps and she rescued a couple dozen of them. Later because of my ( never ending ) interest in the Civil War she gave me the maps, but only one survived the years in our garage.  I finally had this map properly framed with museum glass and everything. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)

More Civil War Maps

While the United States War Department's Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies was originally published in 1880) is the defining book of Civil War maps,  you can learn more about mapmaking in the Civil War by looking at the gorgeously printed  Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War (1999) written by Earl B. McElfresh, which includes many maps not included in the Atlas. I picked up my copy at an antique outlet for about $15.