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The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
Ebook461 pages4 hours

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps

By Edward Brooke-Hitching

4.5/5

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About this ebook

Discover the mysteries within ancient maps — Where exploration and mythology meet

This richly illustrated book collects and explores the colorful histories behind a striking range of real antique maps that are all in some way a little too good to be true.

Mysteries within ancient maps: The Phantom Atlas is a guide to the world not as it is, but as it was imagined to be. It's a world of ghost islands, invisible mountain ranges, mythical civilizations, ship-wrecking beasts, and other fictitious features introduced on maps and atlases through mistakes, misunderstanding, fantasies, and outright lies.

Where exploration and mythology meet: Author Edward Brooke-Hitching is a map collector, author, writer for the popular BBC Television program QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London investigating the places where exploration and mythology meet.

Cartography’s greatest phantoms: The Phantom Atlas uses gorgeous atlas images as springboards for tales of deranged buccaneers, seafaring monks, heroes, swindlers, and other amazing stories behind cartography's greatest phantoms.

If you are a fan of this popular genre and a reader of books such as Prisoners of Geography, Atlas of Ancient Rome, Atlas Obscura, What If, Book of General Ignorance, or Thing Explainer, your will love The Phantom Atlas

LanguageEnglish
PublisherChronicle Books Digital
Release dateApr 3, 2018
ISBN9781452168449
The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps
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Author

Edward Brooke-Hitching

Edward Brooke-Hitching is the author of beautifully illustrated non-fiction titles such as The Phantom Atlas, The Sky Atlas, The Devil's Atlas, and The Madman's Library. A writer for the hit BBC television show QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, he lives in a dusty heap of old books and maps in London.

Read more from Edward Brooke Hitching

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Reviews for The Phantom Atlas

4.5/5

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  • 5/5
    A wonderful full color book for all those who love maps, and who love their insight into the history of the period they were created in. Map-heads will love this as a gift. My husband has been known to zone out in front of a map for hours at a time. He loves this book as it is great read.
  • 5/5
    This book is a collection of some of the more interesting places (and, in a few cases, creatures) that were shown on maps despite never actually existing (or being very different from how they were drawn, in the cases of the islands of California and Korea). The reasons for these errors range from honest mistakes and wishful thinking to faulty theories all the way to outright criminality, but they combine to make quite a history of how things weren’t and how some of these persisted (occasionally into this century).Each entry has a history of the origins of the belief in the location, its subsequent history as it showed up on additional maps and records (sometimes drifting as evidence made it clear that it wasn’t where it had been thought), and the eventual debunking (or, in one case, the possibility that an island had existed but sank), along with the approximate longitude and latitude of the place, other names for it, and some maps of the place and related illustrations.All-in-all, this is probably worth it if the subject sounds interesting. I did reduce my rating due to a couple of problems, however. One is that a production error results in the entry for Buss Island being cut off in mid-sentence near the end. The other, which was probably unavoidable, is that significant parts of larger maps (those taking up two pages) get lost in the gutter, impossible to see if one is unwilling to break the spine (and maybe even if one is willing to; I can’t say since I wasn’t). Neither of these seriously detract from the book, though.
  • 5/5
    This book is amazing! Edward Brooke-Hitching has written an atlas of cartography’s mistakes, but you don’t need to have any background knowledge of history or map-making in order to appreciate this wonderful collection. The author does a fantastic job of explaining these histories to a lay audience, and he is very succinct, devoting only a few pages to each blunder. The stories are interesting, covering a broad range of topics: islands that probably existed once but have been swallowed by the ocean, mountains that never were, rival explorers whose “discoveries” outdid each other, races of giants, mythical sea creatures, lost continents, and so much more. I like the author’s tone very much; he does a good job of presenting the facts objectively, but the style is still very readable and, at times, funny. I also like that the content is laid out alphabetically, rather than by type of mistake; this keeps the content varied. The images are beautiful, with clear reproductions of very old maps. All in all, thoroughly enjoyable!
  • 5/5
    Receiving this book, I found such a rich collection of "phantom" maps such that, even for a cartophile like me, I was surprised and delighted to make my way through them. Because the table of contents is in alphabetical order, the maps roam around the globe at will. So it is up to the reader to decide how to attack this compact but dense volume. Every continent and corner of the world is represented here. The history absorbs you and draws you in, leading to ideas of further exploration of the many areas and topics included. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone who loves to pore over maps, charts, and drawings. Exploration of the world was never more fun.