Great gazing. And poring.

Great Maps
by Jerry Brotton


There's so much learning crammed into this book, my feeble little brain couldn't take it all in.  It's an oversized picture book, each two or four-page spread showing and explaining a map that's either significant, beautiful, or puzzling.  In some cases a map is really a collection of maps, like the Vatican Gallery of Maps.  What a thing to see!

I was amused by his method of illustrating the size of the maps.  Beside each was a figure of a human or else a human hand, showing its size relative to something we're all familiar with.  A surprising number of them were much larger than a human being.

He did marvelous work of condensing big things into (relatively) small pages.   I was disappointed only by the amount of space they gave up to show pictures that came out as big blurs.  The small, blown-up pictures of areas of the maps--those were great.  But a few of the "bigger picture" items were just wasted space.

Like many books of illustration, someday this book should be remade as an online resource.  Then the viewer could expand and contract to the limits of his thumb and forefinger.