Map Addict - Hardcover

Parker, Mike

3.61

593 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007300840 ISBN 13: 9780007300846

Publisher: Collins, 2009

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'My name is Mike and I am a map addict. There, it's said...'

Maps not only show the world, they help it turn. On an average day, we will consult some form of map approximately a dozen times, often without even noticing: checking the A-Z, the road atlas or the Sat Nav, scanning the tube or bus map, a quick Google online or hours wasted flying over a virtual Earth, navigating a way around a shopping centre, watching the weather forecast, planning a walk or a trip, catching up on the news, booking a holiday or hotel. Maps pepper logos, advertisements, illustrations, books, web pages and newspaper and magazine articles: they are a cipher for every area of human existence. At a stroke, they convey precise information about topography, layout, history, politics and power. They are the unsung heroes of life: Map Addict sings their song.

There are some fine, dry tomes out there about the history and development of cartography: this is not one of them. Map Addict mixes wry observation with hard fact and considerable research, unearthing the offbeat, the unusual and the downright pedantic in a celebration of all things maps. In Map Addict, we learn the location of what has officially been named by the OS as the most boring square kilometre in the land; we visit the town fractured into dozens of little parcels of land split between two different countries and trek around many other weird borders of Britain and Europe; we test the theories that the new city of Milton Keynes was built to a pagan alignment and that women can't read maps. Combining history, travel, politics, memoir and oblique observation in a highly readable, and often very funny, style, Mike Parker confesses how his own impressive map collection was founded on a virulent teenage shoplifting habit, ponders how a good leftie can be so gung-ho about British cartographic imperialism and wages a one-man war against the moronic blandishments of the Sat Nav age.

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Review:

Mike Parker is 'a marvellous guide: enthusiastic, generous and lucid', Jan Morris

'An historical aside from Mike Parker is worth a monograph from others', New Welsh Review

‘Parker proves a witty and engaging guide’ Guardian

From the Author:

Map Addict has been the book that I've been wanting to write for the best part of twenty years. I am so thrilled that it has finally happened.

While working on the book, every time I told someone what I was up to, they had something to say about the subject - for better or for worse. Maps seem to engage everyone in some way or other, from those of us who can spend happy hours curled up on the sofa reading Ordnance Surveys like others read a Mills & Boon, to those who break out in angry pustules at the sight of one.

As I researched and wrote, it became increasingly obvious that maps touched just about every subject going, from the most basic issues of our identity through our sense of place and history, to the sweeping, sometimes bewildering, changes of the digital revolution. Yet I also wanted to write something that was celebratory and brimful of enthusiasm for maps, and that was determined to find the humour in a topic that is usually considered to be as dry as dust.

Many of the best books about mapping are American, and I was keen to write something that - although the narrative travels far and wide - was foursquare rooted in Britain and the many foibles of Britishness. Our maps still are seen as the best in the world, and for very good reason. Long may it stay that way.

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