Creative Cartography: 7 Must-Read Books on Maps

From tattoos to Thomas More’s Utopia, or what Moby Dick has to do with the nature of time.

We’re obsessed with maps — a fundamental sensemaking mechanism for the world, arguably the earliest form of standardized information design, and a relentless source of visual creativity. Today, we turn to seven fantastic books that explore the art and science of cartography from seven fascinating angles.

THE MAP AS ART

Map As Art, The: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography is the definitive overview of today’s bravest, boldest creative cartography, featuring 360 colorful creations by well-known artists and emerging visual experimenteurs alike, including Brain Pickings favorites Maira Kalman, Paula Scher and Olaful Eliasson. Insightful essays by Gayle Clemans complement the maps and overlay a richer sheath of insight onto the work and creative process of these cartographic artists.

Matthew Cusick, 'Fiona’s Wave,' 2005

Cusick's oversized collages are painted with fragments of vintage atlases and school geography books from the golden era of cartography, 1872-1945.

Qin Ga, 'Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,' 2005

In 2002, China's Long March Project embarked upon a 'Walking Visual Display' along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.

We reviewed it in full here.

YOU ARE HERE

You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination is a beautiful and meditative compendium of maps and musings on maps exploring, in the broadest possible terms, the human condition. Divided into three sections — “Personal Geography,” “At Home in the World” and “Realms of Fantasy” — the book features 50 full-color and 50 black-and-white cartographic illustrations, ranging from a humorous diplomatic atlas of Europe and Asia to a canine view of the world to hand-drawn maps of shelters along the Appalachian Trail.

A selection of diverse essays, from the academic to the personal to the humorous, contextualize the maps within the larger conceptual narrative exploring humanity’s compulsion to map and chart its place in the universe.

FROM HERE TO THERE

We’re longtime fans of the Hand-Drawn Maps Association, an ongoing archive of user-submitted maps, diagrams and other spatial illustrations.

From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association is exactly what it promises — a delightful anthology of ephemeral documents that give direction, from quirky doodles to remarkably detailed drawings on anything from Dallas skate parks to questionable tourist routes in Bulgaria’s mountains.

Eccentric yet unassuming, From Here to There offers a charming visual treat and, in the process, reveals fascinating slivers of human stories.

RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY

An Atlas of Radical Cartography is as much about the art of cartography as it is about social activism, pairing artists, designers, architects, urban planners and cultural institutions in an ambitious volume that explores mapping projects across social justice, globalization, energy, human rights and more.

It features 10 eye-opening maps on everything from marginal land settlement in Calcutta to the Los Angeles water cycle by 10 different artists, alongside 10 compelling essays on sociopolitical issues examined through the prism of cartography.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography comes from The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, an inspired editorial collective hosting dialogs and initiating art projects that facilitate idea exchange and pro-social action.

STRANGE MAPS

Based on the excellent blog of the same name, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities features 138 of the most fascinating, absorbing and remarkable maps from the blog’s 3-year history of culling the world’s forgotten, little-known and niche cartographic treasures. From the world as depicted in Orwell’s 1984, to a color map of Thomas More’s Utopia, to the 16th-century portrayal of California as an island where people live like the Amazons, the book is brim-full of priceless anecdotes from our collective conception of the world over the centuries.

Strange Maps is one of our favorite blog-turned-book success stories. We reviewed it in full here.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF TIME

Since antiquity, humanity has had an ongoing fascination with the nature of time, struggling not only to understand it but to also visualize it and thus make it more digestible, more tangible, more graspable.Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. The gorgeous, lavishly illustrated collection of timelines features everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain. BibliOdyssey has a sneak peek.

Cartographies of Time is easily one of the most beautiful books to come by in the past year, both a treasure trove of antique artwork and a priceless cultural timecapsule containing humanity’s understanding of time and place in the larger context of existence.

MAPS OF THE IMAGINATION

On a most fundamental level, maps are visual storytelling about the world — about what exists in it, what matters in it, and where we belong relative to it. In Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi explores how some of greatest storytellers in literary history employed maps as narrative devices, revealing some remarkable similarities between mapmaking, traditionally perceived as an analytical science, and the art of writing fiction. From Melville to Nabokov to Stevenson to the Marx Brothers, the book features hundreds of extraordinary illustrations from and about iconic works of literature.

Maps of the Imagination is a genre-defying gem that straddles art book, writer’s manual and cultural critique in an utterly captivating way that makes you look at both old maps and familiar fiction with new eyes.

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Sound Unbound: DJ Spooky Explores Remix Culture

We’re big proponents of remix culture as the great enabler and cross-pollinator of creativity. Musician, producer, filmmaker and author Paul D. Miller, better-known as DJ Spooky, is one of remix culture’s most vocal and avid beacons, a rare champion of both its creative practice and its sociopolitical theory. In Sound Unbound, he curates a provocative and intelligent collection of essays drawing on the last 500 years of collaborative creation across music, art and literature and tracing everything from the history of stop-motion photography to Muslim influences on early hip-hop.

From an introduction by BoingBoing co-founder and open culture advocate Cory Doctorow to Brian Eno‘s exploration of the history of bells in Europe as a regulator of time to an investigation of the evolution of copyright law by Google’s senior legal counsel, the book features a wide and fascinating spectrum of texts by 36 of today’s most compelling, controversial and creative thinkers on remix culture.

Accompanying the book is a 45-track collage of a CD featuring fantastic, unexpected remixes blending rare historical recordings with modern music to deliver gems like “The Western Land” (William S. Burroughs and Iggy Pop with Techno Animal), “Erratum Musical (Score for Three Voices)/Voyage for Three” (Marcel Duchamp/George Lewis and Aki Takase) and “Eolian Episode/Gnossiene” (James Joyce/Erik Satie).

You can sample audio clips from it here, here and here, and catch an exclusive interview with DJ Spooky about the project.

As an artist, I’m a gatherer of personalities. I like pulling together radically different people and seeing what everybody has to say, and just kind of let it be a social sculpture.” ~ DJ Spooky

Sound Unbound is as much a research project into humanity’s propensity for non-linear thinking and co-creation as it is bold affirmation for the democratization of media and what we call combinatorial creativity.

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Zentangle: Pattern-Drawing as Meditation

If greater creativity and more mental balance are among your new year’s resolutions, look no further than Zentangle — a type of meditation achieved through pattern-making, created by artist duo Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts. Each pattern is built one line at a time, organically combining simple patterns into complex zentangles in unplanned, unexpected ways that grow, change and unfold on the page as you enter an immersive state of flow. Totally Tangled offers a fantastic introduction to the relaxing and beautiful practice through step-by-step instructions and over 100 original tangles.

We’re particularly taken with Zentagle because its basic principle — building on simple shapes and combining different patterns into complex creativity — is such a beautiful visual metaphor for our core philosophy of combinatorial creativity.

Whether you’re a complete beginner or a professional artist, Totally Tangled can transform your casual, fidgety backpage doodling into a powerful meditative creative outlet. That, or at the very least rekindle your relationship with ink and paper in the midst of our digital flurry.

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