How to Draw a Map

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.

• Publishing in time for Father’s Day 2019 – a brilliant gift for dads.

• Beautiful hardback book with 60 original illustrations of maps.

• Comps: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall has done fantastically well, selling 250k TCM in paperback, and 16k TCM in hardback. Also On The Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield has sold 84k TCM copies to date.

• Father and son Malcolm Swanston and Alex Swanston are available for publicity around publication.

Competition: The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps;The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps;Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps: The Atlas of Everything You Never Knew You Needed to Know;The Map Book. Edward Brooke-Hitching;Martin Vargic;Peter Barber