Talking Maps

Maps have always been intertwined with stories, providing narratives for travelers, explorers, and surveyors, visual accounts of changes to people, places, and spaces, and imaginary tales that transport us to fictional worlds. Talking Maps explores the Bodleian Library's outstanding map collection, spanning almost a thousand years, and demonstrates how maps and stories have been intimately entwined. It analyzes maps as tools for navigation, windows into alternative and imaginary worlds, guides to the afterlife, tools for managing cities, nations, and empires, images of environmental change, and digitized visions of the global future.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 05 July 2019
Publisher: Bodleian Library

Every map tells a story. Some provide a narrative for travelers, explorers, and surveyors, or offer a visual account of changes to people's lives, places, and spaces, while others tell imaginary tales, transporting us to fictional worlds created by writers and artists. In turn, maps generate more stories, taking users on new journeys in search of knowledge and adventure. Drawing on the Bodleian Library's outstanding map collection and covering almost a thousand years, Talking Maps takes a new approach to map-making by showing how maps and stories have always been intimately entwined. Including such rare treasures as a unique map of the Mediterranean from the eleventh-century Arabic Book of Curiosities, al-Sharīf al-Idrīsī's twelfth-century world map, C.S. Lewis's map of Narnia, J.R.R. Tolkien's cosmology of Middle-earth, and Grayson Perry's twenty-first-century tapestry map, this fascinating book analyzes maps as objects that enable us to cross sea and land; as windows into alternative and imaginary worlds; as guides to reaching the afterlife; as tools to manage cities, nations, even empires; as images of environmental change; and as digitized visions of the global future. By telling the stories behind the artifacts and those generated by them, Talking Maps reveals how each map is not just a tool for navigation but also a worldly proposal that helps us to understand who we are by describing where we are.

Weight: 1522g
Dimension: 279 x 280 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781851245154