Calling All Cartophiles

I have to admit to having a bit of a thing for maps and charts; I find them utterly fascinating and can lose myself in them in just the same way that I can stare for hours at a fire or the ocean, and I don't think that I'm alone in this.  

Close your eyes, stick a pin in, and make a plan to go there.

Maps have been with us for thousands of years, allowing us to locate ourselves and place ourselves egotistically at the centre of our own personal universe, however big or small.  They allow us to travel without moving anything more than our eyes, faster than the speed of light, shrinking geography to a manageable scale and making every single one of us an explorer.  

Maps and charts transcend languages and, I would imagine, predate human speech - how else do you think homo sapiens who'd not yet figured out how to organise their grunts into primitive language were able to direct each other to food sources and co-ordinate hunts?  I'd like to think that they grabbed a stick and used it to draw directions in the dirt - the original mud map.  At some point our artistic interpretations of the landscape around us took to the skies and showed our world as the gods saw it.  We looked up to map the constellations, and we did our best to look down, taking an educated guess at what lay over the unknown horizon and beneath the sea.  Where there were blank spaces yet to be explored, cartographers used their imaginations and either made something up or drew a monster.

Both my grandfather and my great-grandfather on my mother's side worked at the Ordnance Survey. Somewhere there is a wonderful photograph of my grandfather in North Africa during WWII surveying as part of his role as a map maker for the Royal Engineers.  Perhaps my appreciation of cartography is partly down to genetic memory?

Maps take many forms and information can be presented in many different ways, the most obvious being the two flavours that world maps come in: political or geographical, one being subject to the short term nature of humanity and the lines that we draw in the sand and the other showing what is physically present but only in a narrowly defined scientific category such as vegetation or elevation.  No map can show everything and therefore no map is perfect, and in fact most of the information that we are shown is presented over a flawed template because it is so difficult to present the surface of a sphere undistorted on a flat surface.  Gerardus Mercator produced the best attempt to date in 1569 and that still forms the basis for our view of a flat world map 445 years later, but there's no getting around the fact that Greenland just isn't that big.  If a map is conveying information where location is one of the key considerations, then how it is presented is down to the cartographer.  When Harry Beck sat down at his drafting table in 1931 to produce a new map of the London Underground he took inspiration from an electronic circuit board and spaced each station more or less equally, showing how stations related to each other across the entire network rather than laying them out geographically.  It's an iconic design that has been printed more than any other map in history and is absolutely fit for purpose, but you couldn't use it to navigate yourself overland from Hammersmith to Upminster very easily.  All the same, I don't understand why I've never seen anybody waiting for the tube with Harry's famous coloured lines tattooed on their forearm.  

Other maps show such information as GDP per capita, weather patterns, military spending by country, place names sized in relation to population and how many people are currently online.  The list of what we can convey using a map goes on and on, and there are many different ways in which we can do it.

I have no idea how I manage to get any work done with this lot stuck up in front of my face above my desk.  W.Graham Arader III (the most famous, wealthy and contentious map collector/dealer in the world) probably doesn't have anything to worry about, but I am pretty fond of some of my maps and charts and the day dreams that they trigger.  Current favourites include the "Anti-Piracy Planning Chart" and "Time Zones of Antarctica" map.  

I recently picked up a second hand book called "The War Atlas", a volume of "carto-journalism" produced as part of a series illustrating inequality by a socialist publishing house.  The spread shown above shows the post Cold-War distribution of nuclear weapons (c.1982) looking down on the North Pole.  It is equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

Maps do an awful lot of things and one of the things that they do incredibly well is arouse curiosity where they are meant to sate it.  They tell us enough about a place to pique our interest but never transport us there physically.  They are the ultimate cause of itchy feet, and for that I love them.

My oldest friend gave me this beautiful three dimensional relief nautical chart for my birthday last year.  He said that he'd tried to find one for somewhere that I'd visited on a surf trip but then, as my birthday drew near, he panicked and "just bought the coolest looking one that they had" and in doing so inadvertently added another destination to my "must visit" list.

Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands is one of those books that I dearly wished I had written.  I think that I would probably have written a slightly different subtitle if I had been the author though:  

"Fifty Islands I have not visited but intend to".

 The stuff that dreams are made of/dual purpose bedside lighting and inspiration.

 If you want to see an incredible collection of maps then check out "40 maps that will help you make sense of the world" over on Twisted Sifter.  They are incredible and many of them are very thought provoking.  

And, if you're looking for some bedtime reading in old-fashioned paper and ink form then "On The Map" by Simon Garfield will tell you everything you ever thought you wanted to know and then some about cartography in it's many guises.  That, and an Atlas.

Books = Knowledge

Books are bloody wonderful.  I’m sure that my bedroom presents somewhat of a fire risk because over the years I’ve done my best to cram it full of books and magazines - filling shelves, worktops and old wine crates with words printed on paper.  The same is true at my Dad’s house where I periodically deliver books to store on his shelves when there’s no space left on mine. 

It’s World Book Day this coming Thursday, March 6^th.  To celebrate this and to remind myself (and hopefully you also) of just how important books are for the absorption of knowledge, the development of values and for straight-up stoking the imagination, I want to present a selection of my favourites:

Travel and Adventure

I lay a great deal of the blame for me spending a large number of my adult years skint and in wonderful foreign countries squarely on the shoulders of books about travel and adventure.

• The Ra Expeditions – Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian anthropologist who challenged conventional views on how ancient cultures spread around the world.  Following his incredible voyage across the Pacific on the Kon-Tiki raft, he set out to show that ancient Egyptians could have crossed the Atlantic on reed boats by doing just that on The Ra, providing a possible solution to such mysteries as parallel pyramid cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
• The Cruise of the Snark – Adventure-fiction author Jack London’s account of his own real-life adventure on a two year voyage around the Pacific at the turn of the century, including early descriptions of wave-riding in Hawaii.
• Vagabonding – Unlike destination-specific travel guides, Rolf Potts’ book is an insightful guide to making long-term and wide-ranging travel a reality.
• Across the Empty Quarter – Wilfred Thesiger was one of the world’s last true explorers, travelling across and experiencing the blank spaces on the map.  He spent a great deal of time on the Arabian Peninsula and if you ever end up in that part of the world then this account of his journeys with Bedouin tribesmen across the desert is right up there on the essential reading list.
• Paddling My Own Canoe – Audrey Sutherlan is a remarkable woman who, in-between holding down a full-time job and raising a family that included world-class surfer Jock Sutherland, spent her vacation each year exploring the rugged and inaccessible northeast coast of Moloka’i in the Hawaiian Islands.  She scrambled, swam and eventually paddled an inflatable canoe on a number of exploratory solo trips that are fairly certain to make you yearn for an adventure of your own.

Riding Waves

Transcribing the feeling of riding waves onto paper is a mighty difficult thing to do and one that many authors stumble and fall on.  How to write about something so personal and difficult to describe in a way that appeals to non-surfing readers without alienating fellow wave-riders?  In my mind, only three writers have really done this well.

• In Search of Captain Zero – If you can get hold of a copy of Allan C. Weisbecker’s romantic, and ultimately somber, account of his journey from Long Island to Costa Rica in search of an old friend then do so.
• The Voyage of The Cormorant – Currently on loan to a good friend who asked to borrow “the best book about surfing that I have”.  Christian Beamish is one of contemporary surfing’s most eloquent scribes and his book about building his own boat and sailing it down the wild coast of Baja Mexico in search of surf is raw, wild, honest, scary, real adventure.
• Breath – Tim Winton is one of Australia’s greatest novelists and a dyed-in-the-wool surfer, but he had never, until Breath, written about surfing.  It was worth the wait.

John Steinbeck

I was originally going to write about literature, then erred towards American literature, before finally succumbing to the cold, hard, reality that all I was really doing was searching for an excuse to gush forth about how much I love the writing of John Steinbeck.  If you never had to read “Of Mice And Men” at school then I urge you to right that wrong as soon as you possibly can, and use that book as a gateway to the work of one of the last century’s most insightful writers.  Steinbeck writes about the essential human tragedy with an insight, wit, tenderness and melancholy that stops me in my tracks time after time and book after book. 

Big Pictures

Photographs were never intended to be viewed on a screen; they should be printed and hung on walls or immortalised in big, rich, coffee table volumes.

From bottom to top:

• Leroy Grannis – Page after beautiful page of some of the most iconic surf photography from the 1960s and 70s.
• 180 South – Try this on for adventure.  A photographic account (to accompany the movie) of Jeff Johnson and Chris Malloy’s journey retracing the steps of Yvon Chouinnard and Doug Tompkins from California to Chilean Patagonia.
• The California Surf Project – It’s exactly what it says on the spine – a book by master-of-his-craft surf photographer Chris Burkard full of amazing, golden hour, images defining surfing in California.
• Bend To Baja – A biofuel powered surfing and climbing road trip for Bend, Oregon to the tip of Baja Mexico.  It’s another one that’ll have you making plans for adventure.
• Unexpected – Over the past thirty years Patagonia have amassed a library of “outdoor sports” images that is simply mind-blowing.  This book showcases some of the photography that has been featured in their catalogues with the stories behind many of them.
• Way of the Bird – Andrew Kidman takes incredible photos of breaking waves, and Andy Davis has an iconic style of illustration that often focuses on surfers.  A simple idea to craft a children’s book by laying Ando’s illustrations over the top of Kidman’s photography  has created something amazing.
• Sipping Jetstreams – Oh, wow.  Dustin Humphrey showcases the beauty of the world (specifically Morocoo, Cuba, Italy, Hong Kong, Barbados, Japan and Egypt) through the eyes of a surfer, illustrating just how incredible and broad an experience this pastime can give you.  I bought this big old book in Australia and easily justified the expense of posting it back to the UK.  It is directly responsible for me booking a number of flights and placing camera gear on an equal standing with surfboards on my packing lists.

G’Arghh!

A series of short and brilliantly funny novels about incompetent pirates who love ham and roaring.  I reckon that each one can be read in a day (on the beach or of solid travel) or over a more leisurely three days or so and they’re small, which makes them perfect for weekend trips.  My copy of the first book (The Pirates!  In An Adventure With Scientists) has done a lap of the planet in my bag and collected the signatures of twenty three friends and travelling strangers on the inside cover, none of whom told me I'd wasted their time in lending it to them.

My War and Peace

The Great War For Civilisation:  The Conquest of The Middle East.

I have been toiling away at this brick of a book on and off for three years now.  The reason that I haven’t given up on it is that it is the book that has been recommended to me more than any other, and by people whose opinions I absolutely value.  It is probably Robert Fisk’s defining work.  Fisk has been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for over thirty years (first for The Times newspaper and then for The Independent) and holds more British and international journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. Simply put, he knows his subject. 

This is a powerful book about the history and impact of religious and political conflict in the Middle East.  It is often eye opening and harrowing and doesn’t make for pleasant bedtime reading.  But it is a statement of facts that it is important and valuable to be aware of and to in some way attempt to understand as a human being.    I hope that it doesn’t take me another three years to finish the second half.

P.S.

I haven't posted links to websites where you can purchase these books because, although shopping online is convenient, I kind of prefer real life bookshops and they need the support.  If you are able to then please order and buy from your local independent bookshop.