On The Map by Simon Garfield

On The Map offers a chronological history of maps, atlases, charts, and globes from Ancient Egypt to contemporary digital cartography, and along the way provides a wealth of facts and anecdotes, all delivered with the expansive liveliness of an expert story-teller. Simon Garfield acknowledges he is neither a cartographer nor a professional historian, but his painstaking research and enthusiasm more than compensate for any omissions – there is very little on maps of Asia, for example – or for the lack of a rigorous guiding principle of the kind expected in books with more academic pretensions. Garfield, justifiably, is as enthralled by the beautiful, often factually erroneous drawings of the distant past as he is by today’s GPS, video-game landscapes, and social-media-based graphics. Given Garfield’s descriptive intensity, it seems particularly strange that the black-and-white map illustrations that feature throughout are often reduced in scale to an extent that they become practically illegible.

Perhaps because Simon Garfield is a journalist rather than a historian, his understanding of the average reader’s attention span is mercifully realistic. In this eminently readable history of map-making, Garfield rarely offers a train of thought that is not rounded off with a fascinating anecdote or neat piece of cartographic trivia. The fact that the book, which covers a lot of ground in over 400 pages, tends to wander unpredictably or gloss over certain important subjects, only adds to its appeal for the non-specialist. Regrettably, the visual presentation of maps – too many compressed, hard-to-decipher images – fails to match the standard of the text. Also, some of Garfield’s observations on contemporary achievements in map-making like GPS – ‘a loss to geography, history, navigation … and the sense of being connected to the world around us’ – seem overly critical. On the whole, however, this is a fine introduction to the subject.

Simon Garfield clearly has a gift for digging up intriguing facts and stories, and this wide-ranging history of map-making, from Ptolemy in Ancient Alexandria to the interactive, digital images of today, generously illustrated with well-chosen historical treasures, is entertaining in many respects. Its best chapters tend to be those built around controversies such as the debate over the authenticity of a map claimed to depict sea voyages to America by the Norse hundreds of years before Columbus, but, overall, it suffers from a lack of a clear focus. Ironically, for a book about maps, the reader all too easily gets lost in all the vivid detail and anecdotes. One is also distracted by some awkward phrasing and surprisingly imprecise language. On the whole, however, the book does the job as a lively guide for those who are interested in maps but do not necessarily know much about them.

All surveys are, by nature, selective, and it is hardly surprising that books such as On The Map, which attempts to cover over 2,000 years of map-making in an accessible way for readers who know little about the field, should skip or just sample certain subjects: for example, the methods and tools map-makers have used through history are barely touched on. Harder to accept or rationalise is the apparent lack of a guiding principle, besides that of cramming in as many fascinating facts as possible, and making it all fun. Garfield has a talent for communicating a telling detail or a curious turn of events, and he is particularly strong on certain periods of history, including the modern era. His chapter on such achievements as satellite navigation systems and mapping structures in computer games shows an admirably open-minded curiosity.