Cartography: The Ideal and Its History

University of Chicago Press, 2019.
ISBN 978-0-226-60554-8 cloth; 978-0-226-60568-5 paper; 978-0-226-60571-5 e-book.
Order via the link at right

Reviews

(1) Jerry Brotton, “Into Uncharted Territory,” Times Higher Education (18 July 2019): 44–45. (paywall)

“Book of the week: Jerry Brotton is enthralled by a book that seeks to overturn just about everything we think we know about maps.”

The press has its own money quote, already added to the sales blurb (see the link at right), but mine is:

“He has convincingly overturned the presumptions of an entire discipline and those who both practice and study it, all of whom will need to assimilate and respond to this work in order to understand the future of mapping and cartography as a concept. It deserves to generate much debate and undoubted controversy, but I am sure that Edney will be up for the conversation (especially since, under his forensic eye, nearly all of us within the field come in for censure at some point!).”

(2) Doug Specht, Bulletin of the Society of Cartographers 53 (2019): forthcoming. A preprint is available, and the review was reprinted on a communication studies blog hosted by the University of Westminster.

“And thus, we must revisit these preconceptions and understand the Ideal of Cartography in order to reveal the myriad ways in which people produce, circulate and consume maps.

This is then quite the affront for those of us who have long worked with maps, and one that is initially rather jarring for the reader. However, persisting through the provocative opening paragraphs reveals that Edney has no intention of letting the reader deal with this alone. His thoughts flow effortlessly across the page, anecdotes and first-person quips draw the reader along with him. And while he repeatedly reminds the reader that we have been all been misled and duped by the Ideal, he still makes us want to understand why.”

Update 14 Sep 2019: It seems that the Society of Cartographers dissolved itself as of 11–12 September, 2019, so I have no idea if Mr. Specht’s review will actually be printed.

(3) Jane Rohrer’s commentary, “Maps of Nothing, Maps of Everything, and Matthew Edney’s Analysis of Cartography’s Idealism,” for the U. Pitt Sawyer Seminar on Information Ecosystems (13 September 2019) is less about the book and more a reflection upon the a seminar I led, riffing off the book.

(4) Jonathan Crowe, short review at The Map Room (1 October 2019).

(5) Jeremy Crampton in Imago Mundi 72, no. 1 (2020): 71–72. Concluding summary:

“What is at stake is addressed in the short final chapter. The ideal of cartography is a sleight of hand because it conceives maps as crystallized depictions of the world that can be read back by map users and therefore diverts attention from the processes of their production, circulation and effects. Edney has written a powerful book, often laced with humour and gnomic chapter headings (my favourite is ‘cartography is a map of mapping’). Edney has done a great job of bringing his arguments to a wider audience, and it will be interesting to see where he goes next.”

(6) John Krygier in Isis 111, no. 1 (2020): 207–8. Concluding summary:

“Matthew Edney’s Cartography: The Ideal and Its History provides a corrective, a reimagined intellectual framework for maps and mapping that will, when engaged and operationalized, greatly broaden our understanding of the wondrous array of inscriptions and practices we call maps and mapping”

(7) Ron Grim in Portolan 107 (2020): 36–37. No money quote per se, but Ron has kindly endorsed an argument that others seem to want to resist:

“In the final discussion, “Map Scale and Cartography’s Idealized Geometry” (Chapter 5), [Edney] explains his contention that the concept of large, medium and small scale referring to the ratio between the real world and the detail that is depicted on a map should be better stated as low, medium, and high resolution. In this day of digital imagery and zoom capabilities, I applaud this new terminology, because of the confusing nature of explaining to lay audiences the relationship between large and small scale and the corresponding representative fractions.”

(8) Laurent Jégou in Mappemonde 127 (2019): art. 1711. This review (in French) starts with an exclamation on the size of the bibliography and describes this as the “culmination” (aboutissement) of my work; I just have to observe, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Jégou is sensitive to the fact that English is different from French, which lacks multiple terms for “cartography” (as “mapping”) such that the ideal is more hidden in Francophone culture than it is in Anglophone. He finds the whole a dizzying, restless, forceful work. He ends with the obligatory comments about what is lacking, in particular consideration of non-Anglophone cartography and also the recent drive to web-mapping. Otherwise a solid review.

(9) Judith A. Tyner in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 50, no. 4 (2020): 587. This is a brief review that concludes,

The book is not a fast read, but is one that will undoubtedly generate lively discussion in the community of map historians.

(10) Jörn Seeman edited a forum—originally planned as an author-meets-the-critics panel at the April 2020 AAG meeting, which was of course postponed—on Cartography that was published in AAG Review of Books 8, no. 4 (2020): 223–35. A couple of the critics are hostile, a couple are appreciative, and a couple are in-between. The final published version included my long-ish response, “Rethinking ‘Cartography’” (231–34).

(11) Steven Seegel in Cartographic Journal 57, no. 3 (2020): 284–85.

(12) Ryan Barker in Terrae Incognitae 53, no. 2 (2021): 159–60.

(13) Jack Swab in Cartographic Perspectives 98 (2022): 73–75.