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Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations
CARTOGRAPHIA offers a stunning array of 200 of the most beautiful, important, and fascinating maps in existence, from the world's largest cartographic collection, at the Library of Congress. These maps show how our idea of the world has shifted and grown over time, and each map tells its own unique story about nations, politics, and ambitions. The chosen images, with their accompanying stories, introduce the reader to an exciting new way of "reading" maps as travelogues---living history from the earliest of man's imaginings about planet earth to our current attempts at charting cyberspace.
Among the rare gems included in the book are the Waldseemuller Map of the World from 1507, the first to include the designation "America"; pages from the Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570, considered the first modern atlas; rare maps from Africa, Asia, and Oceania that challenge traditional Western perspectives; William Faulkner's hand-drawn 1936 map of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; and even a map of the Human Genome. In an oversized format, with gorgeous four-color reproductions throughout, Catrographia will appeal to collectors, historians, and anyone looking for a perfect gift.
Among the rare gems included in the book are the Waldseemuller Map of the World from 1507, the first to include the designation "America"; pages from the Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1570, considered the first modern atlas; rare maps from Africa, Asia, and Oceania that challenge traditional Western perspectives; William Faulkner's hand-drawn 1936 map of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; and even a map of the Human Genome. In an oversized format, with gorgeous four-color reproductions throughout, Catrographia will appeal to collectors, historians, and anyone looking for a perfect gift.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published October 25, 2007
12 people are currently reading
472 people want to read
About the author
Vincent Virga
20 books32 followersVincent Virga has been called "America's foremost picture editor." He has researched, edited, and designed picture sections for more than 150 books, including Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States and the full-length photo essay The Eighties: Images of America. He is also the author of A Comfortable Corner. He is working on a third novel, Theatricals.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 25, 2025
This is not, so much, a book about maps or cartography or the history of map development. This is rather a large, heavy coffee-table sized book on the history of civilizations making use of the maps collected in the U.S.A Library of Congress. The narrative of the book revolves around what maps tell us about the civilizations that made them - maps as cultural documents, the art and science of mapping (which is barely covered), and world history as expressed in maps. The concept would have been interesting, but poor execution made this book fall flat for me. The convoluted sentences; stodgy writing style; and simplistic, somewhat muddled, disjointed, and disorganized, history of the various regions made what could have been an interesting book tedious to read, despite all the colour graphics of various maps on nearly every page. The book did contain new-to-me information and some interesting history-snippets, but this information was hard won while wading through Virga's soporific morass of text. I also wonder at Virga's choice in maps - surely there were better ones that illustrate the point he was trying (ineptly) to make? This book was thoroughly disappointing.
May 31, 2008
Before we moved to Seattle, when we were visiting Seattle only about once per year, one of my obligatory stops was Metzger's Maps, a store that sells all kinds of maps and map-related products. Street maps, highway maps, historical maps, globes, topographical maps, satellite photos, atlases, travel books with maps included, magnifiers, transparent rulers, ... I loved that store, and I love maps. I can spend many hours poring over a Tokyo subway map, or a map of Paris, or an atlas now long out of date, or a map of an imaginary place, or an imagined map of a real place.
So when I saw Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, I thought I was in for a real treat. A history of maps! An analysis in historical context of maps through history, showing how they represent not only places and geography and politics, but also serve to put forward a point of view, an agenda. This book should have been a delight. Somehow, though, Vincent Virga managed to write a boring and discursive book about maps or, rather, a boring and discursive book in which maps serve merely as foil and backdrop to another agenda.
Nothing could have rescued this book, but there are some obvious problems with the design and layout that would have made it at least tolerable. There are, to its credit, maps on nearly every page. But each map is accompanied by just a short description intended, I think, to link back to the surrounding ocean of text. Much better would have been to have a sidebar discussion of each map, set off with contrasting background color, perhaps, or a border, clearly linked to that map. Instead, the book simply refers to the map by plate number, and the map itself is seldom described in any detail but is simply used as an exemplar of some more general point that the author is trying to make.
Virga had the entire resources of the Library of Congress at his disposal. I found myself wondering whether the maps he selected were really the best available. I wondered whether Virga even likes maps, whether he enjoys them for their own sake.
There were so many missed opportunities in this book. There were some ancient maps, among the first maps created in a number of ancient civilizations. In some cases they are nearly incomprehensible, serving as a reminder that maps require interpretation, that they are an abstraction representing particular ways of viewing the world. And if those world views are distant enough from our own, the map itself can serve as a kind of meta-map into the thought processes of the culture in which the map was created. But to gain that understanding itself requires interpretation, which Virga fails to do.
Besides the dismal failure to properly treat the maps that he selected for this book, it is also instructive to think about the maps that he omitted. For example, it would have been useful and interesting to consider modern computer-generated maps of the internet. He does show a highly stylized map of major interconnects around the globe, but he completely ignores the many excellent recent examples of clever ways to represent dense networks. Similarly he offers no treatment whatsoever of maps whose region-sizes are proportional to some demographic measure, heat-maps, mind-maps, or any of the recent visualization methods that can be considered as maps.
This book is a disappointment.
So when I saw Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations, I thought I was in for a real treat. A history of maps! An analysis in historical context of maps through history, showing how they represent not only places and geography and politics, but also serve to put forward a point of view, an agenda. This book should have been a delight. Somehow, though, Vincent Virga managed to write a boring and discursive book about maps or, rather, a boring and discursive book in which maps serve merely as foil and backdrop to another agenda.
Nothing could have rescued this book, but there are some obvious problems with the design and layout that would have made it at least tolerable. There are, to its credit, maps on nearly every page. But each map is accompanied by just a short description intended, I think, to link back to the surrounding ocean of text. Much better would have been to have a sidebar discussion of each map, set off with contrasting background color, perhaps, or a border, clearly linked to that map. Instead, the book simply refers to the map by plate number, and the map itself is seldom described in any detail but is simply used as an exemplar of some more general point that the author is trying to make.
Virga had the entire resources of the Library of Congress at his disposal. I found myself wondering whether the maps he selected were really the best available. I wondered whether Virga even likes maps, whether he enjoys them for their own sake.
There were so many missed opportunities in this book. There were some ancient maps, among the first maps created in a number of ancient civilizations. In some cases they are nearly incomprehensible, serving as a reminder that maps require interpretation, that they are an abstraction representing particular ways of viewing the world. And if those world views are distant enough from our own, the map itself can serve as a kind of meta-map into the thought processes of the culture in which the map was created. But to gain that understanding itself requires interpretation, which Virga fails to do.
Besides the dismal failure to properly treat the maps that he selected for this book, it is also instructive to think about the maps that he omitted. For example, it would have been useful and interesting to consider modern computer-generated maps of the internet. He does show a highly stylized map of major interconnects around the globe, but he completely ignores the many excellent recent examples of clever ways to represent dense networks. Similarly he offers no treatment whatsoever of maps whose region-sizes are proportional to some demographic measure, heat-maps, mind-maps, or any of the recent visualization methods that can be considered as maps.
This book is a disappointment.
April 28, 2008
This book was absolutely fascinating. Tons of maps, in all sorts of flavors from all ranges of dates and places, are pictured in full color and analyzed in great detail. Many of the maps don't even seem like actual maps, more like art, which is both cool and a bit off-putting at times, as they doesn't scratch that same itch as staring at a "real" map does.
The book is a coffee table sized massive hardcover. This is awesome, in that you get nice large maps to look at. It absolutely sucks as far as actually reading the book goes. It's huge, it's heavy, and it's absolutely impossible to take anywhere to read outside of your home. I'd have finished this book months ago if the form factor hadn't been so prohibitive.
The book is a coffee table sized massive hardcover. This is awesome, in that you get nice large maps to look at. It absolutely sucks as far as actually reading the book goes. It's huge, it's heavy, and it's absolutely impossible to take anywhere to read outside of your home. I'd have finished this book months ago if the form factor hadn't been so prohibitive.
March 2, 2009
This book could have been so much more. Mr. Virga loves maps as much as I do but is deeply concerned with maps' function in a sort of metaphorical signifier sense, at the expense of their artistry, provenance and history - all the bits I find most interesting. The maps were beautiful but the writing was tortuous, especially if you know any history or appreciate elegant language or incisive examination. For a coffee-table book, I suppose it's first-rate, and there were some very interesting passages here and there. Overall, however, it was a disappointing book of long captions linked together, rather than a book about maps or cartography. Undoubtedly I wished for this book to be more than it was intended.
December 31, 2007
This is a beautiful coffee table sized book on maps and includes many of the maps housed in The Library of Congress. I read the NYT's review of this book and added it to my Christmas list and was delighted to find it under the tree. Includes historic maps in four sections;
1. The Mediterranean World
2. The Three-Part World (Asia, Africa, Europe)
3. The Americas
4. Oceania and Antartica
If you love old maps, you will LOVE this book.
1. The Mediterranean World
2. The Three-Part World (Asia, Africa, Europe)
3. The Americas
4. Oceania and Antartica
If you love old maps, you will LOVE this book.
November 9, 2023
More than just a brief overview, this book details the history of maps around the globe, interweaving history with cultural analysis and philosophy. It covers a lot of information in a limited space, and has a lot of insightful reference photos.
July 14, 2018
Nice sampling of the vast store of maps at the LofC. Narrative somewhat scattered at times, but overall an entertaining and educational read.
September 22, 2009
This book is not for everyone, but I enjoyed the history lessons. Certainly, I would have liked to know more about each map as the text doesn't describe them to the detail I would like them to be interpreted by, but then this already over-sized, coffee-table book would have been bigger. I'm proud of myself for even reading this book and it did put me to sleep many nights while I had it checked out of the library, but it wasn't so horrible as I didn't want to finish it. Yes, there are many other maps to have potentially included, but that just means I have to be the one to find them and explore the ever fascinating world of maps instead of having them delivered to me via a book.
April 29, 2021
A gift from one of my daughters, this book was a journey in time revealing how maps have been used since antiquity for information and disinformation, to direct and misdirect, to influence and persuade. The 200+ illustrations were very informative and rich in adornments, and as reproductions of maps that may span 10s of feet, a 10”x13” book format serves as appetizer to visit the Library of Congress and view the originals.
April 22, 2008
Waited for almost a year to get my hands on this beautiful and engrossing book. Well worth the wait. Beautiful collection of maps from the LoC. Fascinating history of mapmaking, mapreading, and the different and unexpected uses of cartography. Read it front to back, then back to front, then flip thru it a few times.
Want to read
September 9, 2008Phil gave me this for our anniversary. I'd pointed it out to him one time and said it looked interesting. Very cool of him to remember and plan ahead far enough to have it here for our anniversary. Anyway, it's interesting, but not as good as I'd hoped. It's just different than my expectations, so we'll see what I think after a little more reading.
May 12, 2012
The maps included here are great, but the writing style and overall organization left a little to be desired. I would have followed a little better, I think, if it had been chronologically organized, and the map captions were in larger text so my eyes didn't have to do as much hide-and-seek while I was reading.
shelved
January 29, 2008... as a map collector this is most definitely a volume I would love to have a copy of...
Read
May 16, 2009 Virga, Vincent., Grim, Ronald E., Billington, James H., Library of Congress.
New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2007.
Call Number:
GA203.V57 2007
New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2007.
Call Number:
GA203.V57 2007
June 9, 2009
Excellent history of how and why maps were made. The chapter on the Americas seemed a bit long-winded near the end, but the chapter on Africa/Asia/Europe was fascinating and insightful.
August 5, 2015
Interesting read about the history and making of maps. Some of that stuff where you end up thinking wow that seems remarkable or unbelievable.
January 27, 2008
Very interesting!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews