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On The Map
by Simon Garfield

Nothing is cooler than a map. Never has been, never will be.

I’ve personally known this truth since I was a boy, when I spent countless hours on the floor with a variety of maps, poring over every detail I could see, down to the tiniest town, the most remote campground, the curviest, twistiest rivers and roads.

No doubt that backstory explains the eagerness with which I picked up On The Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks by Simon Garfield. A history of cartography is a book I was born to read. Whatever destiny brought me to those pages, I can with some satisfaction report that Garfield’s book admirably performs its task of recounting the history of mapmaking--though perhaps that report comes with a few qualifications.

On The Map by Simon Garfield

On The Map is at its best in its earliest chapters, which serve as a fairly straightforward  account of cartography and its origins, going all the way back to (and even a little bit before) the founding giant of the field, the ancient Alexandrian Greek scholar Ptolemy. We get a relatively linear narrative of geographic progress, several very cool illustrations of old maps--an absolute necessity for a work like this, of course; the point of an interest in maps derives from the joy that comes from looking at them--and that wistful sense of where we’ve been that is elicited from any good work of history.

The only real problem with this book lies in how the author has telescoped much of the history of mapmaking, covering a couple of millennia in roughly half his pages. This is done so that Garfield can devote the second half of his book to the numerous tangential manifestations of cartography that inhabit various niches within today’s societal landscape: the world of dealers in (and stealers of) rare maps; maps as video games (or is it video games as maps?); maps making star turns in Hollywood movies; and finally both Google Maps (the presumed current state of the cartographer’s art) and even the medical art of mapping the human brain. Many of these topics are all well and good and fit in with the rest of Garfield’s narrative to varying degrees; but compared to the glory that is those classic maps of the once-upon-a-time known world--with all their uncertainties, decorative flourishes, and horizon expanding possibilities--some of these more clinical applications of cartographic skill may leave map fans cold. For this reader, at least, the topics got less and less interesting--and the book more of a challenge to read--as the narrative got further and further away from the splendors of globes, atlases and decorated vellum.

Whatever deficiencies may plague On The Map from standpoint of subject matter, one must give due credit to the author for his skill as a writer. Garfield produces smart, breezy prose that welcomes the reader into the narrative and keeps the storyline moving at a brisk pace, with clarity, insight, and enough touches of humor to make the work accessible for a general audience. Even those who have not been obsessed with maps since childhood will find On The Map an interesting, entertaining read--at least until the narrative wanders too far away from its core subject.

Overall, On The Map stands as a good general history of cartography, one that can perhaps serve as an entryway for those who might want to explore the core topic in greater depths; or, for those with just a touch of curiosity, simply as an overview of how our world expanded from a few isolated cultural backwaters into the dizzying, enormous, and complicated landscape that we know today. That, at least, makes Garfield's book a lot like maps themselves: it tells you something about where you are, where you've been, and--should you choose to set out--where you might be going. And that's information that is certainly worth a look.