Cartographia -- Mapping Civilizations by Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress, Little, Brown '07 coffee-table sized, $60, 266 pages, ISBN #0316997668. Index, cartobibliography, dozens of glossy images sprinkled through text.
Geography and map lovers -- and we've learned they are legion -- will adore this lush, oversized, full-color volume. It's divided into four sections: The Mediterranean World: the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Islamic World, the Holy Land, and the Mediterranean Sea; The Three-Part World: Asia, Africa, Europe; The Fourth Part: The Americas: Latin America and Anglo America; and The Fifth Part: Oceania and Antarctica: Oceania and Antarctica.
The hundreds of detailed maps inside encompass such collectors' items as the 1507 Waldseemuller Map of the World, notable for being the first to include the designation "America;" pages from Ortelius's 1570 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, said to be the first modern atlas; William Faulkner's hand-drawn 1936 map of his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County, MS; and a 2001 map of the human genome.
Notably, the maps reflect the perspectives of their draftsmen and their culture, so that some may be jarring to American sensibilities. The book's abundant text follows the evolution of map-making, not only technologically, but politically and culturally. Virga, whose publisher calls "America's foremost picture editor," describes how continents were used through the 19th century as an organizing device for scholarship but that in the 20th century, the human role in shaping the earth became the focus, and people began to ask, "Is Antarctica really a continent, or is it a series of islands joined only by a massive ice shield? Aren't Europe and Asia actually one landmass?" This was supplanted in the past half-century by the study of plate tectonics.
Virga worked collaboratively with The Library of Congress in producing this volume.
