

How to Draw a Map
- Author Malcolm Swanston, Alex Swanston
- Narrator Philip Bretherton
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Publish Date 5 September 2019
- Run Time 6 hours and 29 minutes
- Format x-book®
- Genre Cartography, map-making and projections, Drawing and drawings, Geographical discovery and exploration, Geographical maps (specialist), Historical maps and atlases, History, History of art, Human geography, The Arts, Travel and holiday, Travel guides: routes and ways, Travel maps and atlases, World atlases / world maps.
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Listen to a sample
What to expect
How to Draw a Map is a fascinating meditation on the centuries-old art of map-making, from the first astronomical maps to the sophisticated GPS guides of today.
Maps have influenced humanity in many unexpected ways: life, death, sexual reproduction, espionage, war and peace. How to Draw a Map traces the story of mapmaking – cartography – from the first scratchings on the cave wall to the detailed high-tech ‘navigator’. This is the story of human conceptions, often misconceptions, of our world. It is also a very personal story about a mapmaker’s journey through life – the exciting new perspectives and the occasional misadventures.
Over the last 5,000 years societies and empires have risen and fallen; most, if not all, attempt to record their own visions of our world. In the 15th century, Europeans developed a global reach with their oceanic ships, exploring outward into the world, revealing new possibilities, peoples and opportunities. Mapmakers recorded this journey, revealing to us a window into past triumphs and disasters. The story continues into our own day when diplomats carve up our globe, presenting what we now see as the ‘modern’ world.
In How to Draw a Map, father and son cartographers Alexander and Malcolm Swanston demonstrate the skill, creativity and care involved in the timeless art of creating maps – and what these artefacts reveal about the legion of mapmakers who went before us.
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