Find of the Day: pictorial Maps by Nigel Holmes

A few days ago I ran across pictorial Maps by Nigel Holmes here in New York at The Strand. It's not necessarily a must have, but it does cover some neglected ground. Holmes is unabashedly in favor of maps that have picture on them. As Jonathan Swift famously said,

So geographers, in Africa maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

Holmes points out that one can in fact find elephants in Africa, so the pictorial elements aren't entirely in appropriate. He also gives a nice readable overview of ancient and medieval cartography, something lacking in many map books.

And while we're on the subject... In the middle ages, there were basically three types of maps. Ptolemaic charts were copies of Ptolemy's ancient Atlas, sometimes with additions, but just as often with uncorrected errors handed down from the originals. "T and O" maps were world maps that represented the cosmological order of the world at the expense of cartographic exactitude. They were called T and O because the represented the Mediterranean as a "T" shape and the known world as enclosed in an "O" shaped ocean. Portolan charts were fairly accurate sea charts showing coastlines and coastal towns so that mariners could find their way to port. Interestingly, no one really knows where the Portolans came from. They appeared on the scene in a fairly complete form with no evidence of their sources.

Of course those in the know are aware that they are copies of ancient Atlantean sea charts buried in the Middle East by the Sea Peoples, then dug up by Coptic monks, but that's another story...