22 reviewed Look at the world by Richard Edes Harrison
Review of 'Look at the world' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I love the maps in this book. Richard Edes Harrison is the kind of person who, had he been a writer, would have either created or destroyed a genre. But in the field of cartography, as a technical craft creating artifacts for human consumption, his work stands as towering achievements of creativity. Apparently Harrison would make a photograph of a large globe to use as a template for his artwork: this gives his maps the satellite projection, which is my favorite projection. He dispenses with the insipid addiction to north-south-east-west orientations and freely chooses globe rotations for educational & artistic impact. Then he draws and colors. And what colors, what drawings! My favorite work of his not included in this book is Venezuela:
I wrote a Python script to extract from a scan of one map, "Europe from the East", my absolute favorite, and summarized my findings at Parameter …
I love the maps in this book. Richard Edes Harrison is the kind of person who, had he been a writer, would have either created or destroyed a genre. But in the field of cartography, as a technical craft creating artifacts for human consumption, his work stands as towering achievements of creativity. Apparently Harrison would make a photograph of a large globe to use as a template for his artwork: this gives his maps the satellite projection, which is my favorite projection. He dispenses with the insipid addiction to north-south-east-west orientations and freely chooses globe rotations for educational & artistic impact. Then he draws and colors. And what colors, what drawings! My favorite work of his not included in this book is Venezuela:
I wrote a Python script to extract from a scan of one map, "Europe from the East", my absolute favorite, and summarized my findings at Parameter estimation of satellite-projected maps Github project. You can see this map, and most of the others in this book, at the Rumsey map collection.
This book is a collection of maps Harrison made for Fortune on the eve of official US involvement in World War II. His maps portray a world where people are near each other, where the spaces separating us are more in the mind than in space, where mountains and oceans and rivers matter in creating a people's identity and that can be used to bridge those identities.
Alas, Harrison's towering achievements, and his war and victory over the bland cartographers of his time, appear to have been forgotten. The internet wallows in horrifically ugly Mercator-projected Google/Bing/OpenStreetMaps. The combined creative powers of Wikipedia can only deliver maps with lines totally disconnected from any dialogue, explanation, or introspection, such as this dreadful monstrosity of an anImated GIF of Chinese dynastic history. Authors waxing longwinded on history and culture, topics intimately tied to geographic space, deem it suitable to give one or two incomprehensibly incomplete static maps of some too-large or too-small space barely related to their topic. But there's hope that with a new breed of tools, people, and media will finally start delivering the cartographic insights we need, cf., Jason Davies's work with D3.js.
