On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks
by Simon Garfield
First reviewed March 2013
The “readers also enjoyed” section of goodreads—which I assume is a pullover from AMAZON.COM that I do not remember existing before—is funny because it is all “Garfield” comic books. The author of On the Map has 34 other books, and none of them feature the Jim Davis cartoon cat.
This is the exact type of commingling of online hobbyist community architecture with underlying capitalist extraction that motivated me to move all my reviews off of goodreads. Yuck!
Wild to read a book that references Skyrim when it was almost contemporary and not a rereleased forever game! On The Map was really good!
On the Map was already thoroughly enjoyable when it began to wrap up its cartographic mise en scene. Then, there was a chapter with "Skyrim" in the title: “For map fans interested in where the most intricate and beautiful maps have gone (now that museums and libraries have snapped up all the old ones and phone apps and live 3-D maps have done for the rest), this is where to start looking—in video games, the bold future of cartography." Skyrim is treated with the same scholarly reverence as the Louisiana Purchase ante Lewis and Clark, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, or the geopolitically motivated obfuscation of Africa during the colonial scramble. The Elder Scrolls—the game series of which Skyrim is the latest installment—has never been a book or a movie; that video games are beginning to earn their spot in the cultural conversation shouldn’t be surprising, but after a few dozen stories of sextants and vellum, interactive 3-D fictional renders was a pleasant surprise.
The recent emphasis on personal, always-on GPS is analogous to the in-game map interfaces U.S. video game players have been using to guide characters since at least the topographically-inert-grey-rectangle-with-the-blinking-dot in the top left corner of 1988’s The Legend of Zelda. The implicit trust and fast reliance on Google Maps should come as no surprise, and it truly does make a lot of sense:
And in this way, with no fanfare and very little resistance, a whole generation of parents were alienated, and (many years before mobile apps on phones) maps stealthily entered the lives of young people in an entirely new way. For what is Skyrim if not a huge, playable imaginary atlas? Would Ptolemy and Eratosthenes not have recognized it as a thing of wonder?
Lest it seem On the Map does nothing but assure video game players that Ptolemy would be suitably impressed with their life choices, the point is made that GPS is actually a quite regressive technology gussied up in ones and zeros:
One buys a TomTom (or a Garmin, Strabo, Mio, or Google Map-enabled phone) not for the maps but for the directions, which makes it a rather old-fashioned concept. Lost without a map in the pre-digital world, one would ask for turn-by-turn directions from locals—left at the church and then left again at the town fall—and a GPS performs precisely the same function on a grander scale.
Who needs map-reading skills when you have a guide that break a trip down into simple, thoughtless instruction? (Worry not, game players, for even the much-vaunted Skyrim allows visible, glowing GPS-style trails to follow—it even allows instant travelling via the map—so you need not bother to hone your map reading even in a world with magic instead of satellites).
On the Map is the One Thousand and One Nights of cartography: it feels impossible to predict what the next vignette would be. Facts and tidbits would pop up where you least expected them, such as the etymology of “limelight,” which seems inter alia puzzling for a book about maps. Before it was employed as a spotlight in theaters—or the grammatical shift into the figurative center of attention—an oxyhydrogen flame directed onto calcium oxide was created as a cartographic tool to cut through the fog and inclement weather to enable proper coastal surveys. Orienting one’s self—getting one’s bearings in a relatively novel environment or circumstance—should seem a nonsensical or meaningless phrase, unless you’ve seen ancient maps. “What we regard as north lies to the left, while east is at the top, a placing that has given us the word “orientation.’” “Gerrymander” is in there too, and it has to do with salamanders. On maps. For real.
It’s not all light and laughter with maps, though. As mentioned in Turing’s Cathedral, World War 2 saw The American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas use maps to help identify targets that should not be bombed. On the Map reminds the reader of one more reason to dislike the Nazi Party: “Baedeker’s Britain [a tourism guidebook] served as a template for Hitler’s deliberate cultural destruction in the so-called Baedeker raids, when German bombers were sent to wipe out starred sites to demoralize the enemy.” Even while discussing the heinous uses to which the Nazi regime put cartography, On the Map is capable of injecting some levity:
Monopoly had already annoyed the Germans before the war. Goebbels objected to the fact that the most expensive area on its Berlin board was Insel Schwanenwerder, where many Nazi leaders lived. Fearing that the Third Reich would be associated with capitalism and extravagance, the manufacturers Schmidt were advised to stop selling it; an allied bombing raid on the company subsequently destroying any remaining copies.
The surreal juxtaposition of Goebbels and a Monopoly board—particularly how it irks him—has a Theater of the Absurd quality that is satisfyingly bizarre.
There are too many simply fun to read sections to cover them all. In defense of the Mercator map:
The Mercator map’s main attribute was technical: it provided a solution to a puzzle that had been troubling mapmakers since the world was recognized as a sphere, which is to say back to Aristotle. The problem was: how does one represent the curved surface of the globe on a flat chart? The strict and well-established grid of latitude and longitude was all very well for theoretical coordinates, but the navigator pursuing a constant course sailed on an endless curve.
While the truth about the relative continental distortions “blows the mind” of The West Wing’s CJ Cregg [note from 2025: And our current President in re Greenland], the reader is comforted in knowing that On the Map will acknowledge that, yes, The West Wing did talk about the Mercator Projection. CJ is even quoted, so you're very wise in having brought some information about maps with you on this journey. But then, back to business:
[Mercator’s] enduring breakthrough was his new Conformal projection, the method by which he maneuvered his latitudinal rings to keep all the angles straight (the lines of latitude became farther apart as they moved from the equator). Mariners would thus be able to navigate across the map in straight lines, in keeping with the desired direction of their flickering compass.
The writing always keeps the reader wanting to find out what will be on the next page. Like a map, the mystery of what’s next is the most thrilling part. There are no blank spots in On the Map, not even a wary Hic Sunt Dracones. Which, as it turns out, is a strong metaphor for mystery, danger, the unexplored—the fearfulness with which we attribute the ancient and medieval world—but it’s a historical anachronism. “The phrase “Here Be Dragons” has never actually appeared on a historic map. There have been lots of ironic, nostalgic and fearful uses in literature, but try finding those three words on a map from the golden ages and you’ll look in vain.”
View the map as tool or as art: either way, you can pick out a lot of little details and facts that give maps extra appeal throughout the book. As for forward-facing prognostication, On the Map extrapolates its path from known landmarks:
It was still the early days for internal mapping, but it signified [Google’s]—and cartography’s—intentions: to map every place on earth in more detail than anyone had ever managed before, and in more detail than most people had previously considered necessary. It brought to mind the absurd vision of Lewis Carroll in his last novel Sylia and Bruno Concluded, where the ultimate map was on the scale of a mile to a mile, or Jorge Luis Borges’ fantasy conceit On Exactitude in Science, published in 1946 but purportedly written in 1658, recalling a time when “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”
Skyrim to The West Wing, Columbus to Ptolemy, you’d be hard pressed to find a better guide to maps than On the Map. As for the stories of maps that weren’t told, well, for that you’d need a 1:1 scale of all the maps that ever were. We can leave that to Borges.