The most recommended cartography books

Maps lie. In the standard visualization you have on Google Maps, for instance, Greenland is shown as bigger than the whole South American continent, while it is, in fact, smaller than Argentina.

Monmonier did an incredible job unpacking the many surprising ways in which maps lie. My favorite case is the sneaky introduction, by publishing houses, of fake towns in US road maps to track plagiarists (as plagiarists just copy, they do not care about checking). There are so many fun examples in this profound book. 

Finally, you can’t talk about maps and not talk about sea monsters.

Want to buy a sea monster? Van Duzer tells you how! Given my professional (and personal) interest in cartography, water, sailing, and animals, this book absolutely had to appear on my “Best Books” list. It is very richly illustrated (115 color images), but is not simply a picture book.

Van Duzer’s narrative is engaging and informative. He explores terrifying and whimsical marine creatures that peopled Medieval and Renaissance waters (many are imaginary; some are more or less based on actual sea animals). And he situates them within the broader context of the individual maps, their impact, and marine biology.

Van Duzer thus helps his audience read European Medieval and Renaissance Maps more fully and richly. 

I have long had a plan to write a book on the geopolitics of empire, and so I read lots of books on empire and imperialism. I came across this one some years ago, but I continue to read it. Some books are best dipped it over time.

This 4-volume encyclopedia is a great one for dipping into. The entries are arranged alphabetically and written by experts with a useful guide to further reading. The superb scholarship is matched by clear writing.

There are the usual suspects, such as the Aztec, British, and Chinese empires, as well the less known, at least to me, of the Bulgarian Medieval Empire, the Hittites, and the Nogai Horde. There are also thematic entries ranging from cartography and cities to race and sex.

It is my go-to text for general browsing that I return to again and again. Enlightening and entertaining.

An excellent example of the British Library’s History … in 100 Maps series, this book, by an expert, on the American geopolitical imagination, combines a first-rate text with instructive maps. Handsomely produced, it is good value.

Delve into Amsterdam in 1660, a time period I wasn’t familiar with. The detailed descriptions place you right there as you meet Anneke, a young lady with ambition to a man’s field—cartography. She wants to be more than just a colorist. Anneke wants to draw her own map and include it in Blaeu’s Atlas Maior.

Just as crucial to Anneke’s story is her mother, whose own artistic ambitions were thwarted. She’s very proud of her daughter. In fact, her own ambition inspires her daughter. However, her father won’t admit to either his wife or daughter’s talent since his career is less than stellar. Family secrets are discovered as the novel progresses.

In this beautiful book, Maier guides her readers through the parallel development of Rome (imperial city, Holy See, thriving center of art and intellectualism) with the evolution of mapmaking.

I like the clear way that she shows how the changing city helped inform transitions in how and why maps are made. For example, medieval maps of Rome forefront of the city’s five churches, while downplaying other features, and give the cloistered monk (and modern reader) the opportunity to trace an imagined pilgrimage (I spent many childhood hours with the family atlas imagining my own journeys to faraway lands).

Only in the 19th century, when travel for pleasure becomes widespread, do maps of Rome (and elsewhere), advertising their sponsors, become more utilitarian, enabling tourists to find their own ways, and supplying cheap souvenirs. 

In the introduction to this book and catalog that features map art by Zuni artists, Jim Enote writes, “these maps are like relatives, like aunts and uncles that entrance us with narrations of places they have been to or heard about.” I love this way of thinking about maps as relational. As a non-Indigenous person viewing these maps, they help me to think about mapping and representations of place in new ways, and they challenge Western and colonial mapping traditions and cartographic practices that have often historically been put to the use of empire, land grabs, and greed.

I’ve always felt a desire to make the world make sense through data – that numbers and structure could help unlock hidden meanings. When I read this novel, I felt seen: it’s told from the perspective of T. S. Spivet – a 12-year-old boy who has the same urge. Spivet thoroughly documents the world around him, sketching an ant he sees in the grass, and drawing schematics and maps of the spaces he travels through on his quest to travel to the Smithsonian Institution. The book’s margin is lavishly illustrated with Spivet’s diagrams – in seeing the world through his eyes, it felt like how I see it through my own.

Without doubt the inspiration and key reference work for so many books, websites and studies investigating the design of subway maps. Being one of the only writers on cartography who actually met Harry Beck, Garland was the first to forensically examine the London Tube diagram designed by him. The intimacy of Garlands relationship with beck shines through and informs the whole text. The reader even gets to see some of Becks unpublished works. A simply ‘must have’ for anyone interested in railways, cartography and design in general.

I guess I'm a bit nerdy about maps and do a lot of mapping myself. (My personal obsession is Venice, a hard-to-map yet hypermapped town.) I would like to see more mapping done by everyone as a practice that connects us with the place we live in or with a place we newly discover.

As a map-maker, I follow many of Tyner's guidelines. They help me focus on what is relevant for an effective registration of features and communication.