28 Interesting Books About Maps and Cartography

from Clarke, Victoria, Ed. (2015). Map: Exploring the World. London: Phaidon Press.

Cartography as Art Texts

1. Berry Jill K. (2016). Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists. Rockport Publishers. 
2. Berry Jill K.& Linden McNelly. (2014). Map Art Lab: 52 Exciting Art Explorations in Mapmaking, Imagination, and Travel. Quarry Books.
3. Clarke, Victoria, Ed. (2015). Map: Exploring the World. London: Phaidon Press.
4. Garfield, Simon. (2013). On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks.  Avery.
5. Goodwin, Valerie S. (2013). Art Quilt Maps: Capture a Sense of Place with Fiber Collage-A Visual Guide.  C&T Publishing.
6. Harmon, Katharine. (2016). You Are Here: NYC Mapping the Soul of the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
7. Harmon, Katharine. (2010). The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
8. Harmon, Katharine. (2003). You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
9. Harzinski, Kris. (2010).  From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
10. Hornsby. Stephen J. (2017). Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press;.
11. Jacobs, Frank. (2009). Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities. Viking Studio.

Geography/History/Political Science

1. Baynton-Williams, Ashley. (2015). The Curious Map Book. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 
2. Harley, J. P.  (2002). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Edited by Paul Laxton. Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins Press.
3. Marshall, Tim. (2015). Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World. New York: Scribner.
4. Varga, Vincent. (2007). Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations. New York: Little, Brown and Company

Informational Texts

1. Brotton, Jerry. (2014). A History of the World in 12 Maps. New York: Penguin Books. 
2. Brotton, Jerry.  (2014). Great Maps.  Washington DC: DK.
3. Field, Kenneth. (2018). Cartography. Redlands, CA: Esri Press.
4. Reinhartz, Dennis. (2012). The Art of the Map: An Illustrated History of Map Elements and Embellishments. Sterling.
5. Riffenburgh, Beau. (2015). Mapping the World: The Story of Cartography. London: Andre Deutsch.

Literary & Film Maps

1. DeGraff, Andrew. (2017). Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies. Essays by Andrew Jones. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books. 
2. DeGraff, Andrew. (2015). Plotted: A Literary Atlas. San Francisco, CA: Pulp.

Literature for Adults

1. Chatwin, Bruce. (2012). The Songlines. New York: Penguin Classics.

Picture Books/Informational Books for Young People (Grade 4-8)

1. Hibbert, Claire. (2017). Around the World in 80 Maps. Firefly Books.
2. Mizielinska, Aleksandra & Daniel Mizielinski. (2013). Maps. Big Picture Press.
3. Morrison, Taylor. (2004). The Coast Mappers. Boston, MA: HMH Books for Young Readers.
4. Nuñez, José Jesús Reyes. (2017). Children Map the World: Commemorating the International Map Year. Redlands, CA: Esri Press.
5. Ross, Val.  (2009). The Road to There: Mapmakers and Their Stories. New York: Pemguin.

#SOL16: A Map, Not a Tracing

The start to a substrate

I.

In mid-January of last year about 6 weeks before he would die, three gigantic books of house plans arrived by mail. Each book must have weighed 5 pounds and there were thousands of floor plans. My husband had been dreaming of a new home.

A single floor. No stairs and wheel chair accessible, he would tell me when I came to visit him at the rehab where he was trying to stand again.

Three days later, before I could even cart the last of the heavy books to the rehab, Rob would be transported back to the hospital and there we would learn that the prognosis was now terminal.


II.

A year ago, I prayed so for a line of flight. We were in such need of a map, not a tracing.

#SOL 16: A New Geography

from my art journal, 9.19.16  (acrylic paint, deli paper, marker, stabilo pencil)

I.

Early spring I planted pots and pots of flowers and placed them on the front steps leading to my home. Bright red geraniums and variegated vinca vines spilling out of French blue pots. It was only a couple of weeks after Rob had died and late March remained unseasonably warm. One Saturday, with too much time and too idle hands, I filled a dozen or more blue pots with plants.

Something must live.

This evening I noticed how vibrant the geraniums have remained all these months later. They will likely bloom longer than Rob fought to live. That first weekend after we received the diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer, I watched lectures about treatment from Sloan Kettering late into the night, one after the next and then cried off and on while seated on the floor of the bathroom shower, seated long after the water had turned cold counting off the months Rob would likely live. And the only moment of comfort I remember was when I finally thought, "So long as you can touch him, nothing bad has happened."

Surely he would live.

II.

By that April, the need for Thoreau's 'tonic of wildness' rose up and no suburban geography could quell what Rob's death had unseated. In chapter 17 of Thoreau's Walden, he explains,

"We need the tonic of wildness...we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature...We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander" (p. 265).

I live a mile or so from a modest forest and it was there I found myself wandering further and further each day that spring, breadcrumbs be damned, and it was only tired legs that found me heading home when I so wanted to stay lost.

When the world is less familiar there is comfort in what is left unnamed.


III.

Tonight, with autumn coming on and the geraniums blooming red petals like a color-crazed Morse code,  I want to stop a moment and let my fingers decipher intention. What is it I am learning? I want to pause and say out loud that the tracing is never a map. That which is traced is always a system closed and I cannot walk where I walked with Rob before.

Grief is an unexplorable tension--an infinitely wild geography where the logic of boundaries fail. Here there is a language of starts and stops--utterance I cannot seem to hear and yet know to be true like my very breath. To trod a path new to the feet--is to know momentarily that there is no coming back, there is only becoming and though this knowledge hurts, it also is the first moment of grace.

After so much inconceivable loss,
there is no
                going back.

                                 There is no back.
                                 There is no

On the days when the pain feels unrelenting, it is good to stand in this new country, to hold in my heart an incomplete map, and imagine that over that next rise is life pasturing freely.