BOOKS OF THE DAY
“Painted Countries"
Maps and Map-Makers. By It. V. 1 0019. (liatsiord. jos.)
THE study and collection of early maps is becoming a hobby with many people. It is no new enthusiasm,Tor the Jacobeans delighted in " these painted Countries " and " sweet Pieces," and Hobbes, when a student at Oxford, " loved to visit the booksellers' shops, there to lye gaping on mappes." The present vogue, inspireJ by Thomas Chubb's classic The Maps in the Atlases of Great Britain and Ireland, 1579-1870 11927) and the publication in coloured facsimile of Saxton's splendid atlas of Elizabethan England by the British Museum (1936), has been stimulated more recently by some well-illustrated books and articles on English maps and four masterly bibliographies of our county maps.
Mr. Tooley's work out-ranges all these. A member of one of our most eminent firms of map-sellers, he set out to provide amateur collectors with a reference guide to all important maps, charts and atlases from earliest times down to 1877, as well as to their authors. And this, a task of years and requiring a wide knowledge possessed by very few, he has accomplished in the main most successfully, though he has had to travel a narrow and overcrowded road. By maps here he generally means printed maps, for his occasional allusions to MS. maps are usually too meagre to be helpful. National and official maps, which collectors find useful guides but dull companions, are excluded. The term " map-maker " is used simply for the authors behind the publishers, or, more often, for the publishers themselves.
The first part of the book is historical in plan. The period 500 a.c. to A.D. 1477 is covered very summarily, but a series of chapters, packed with titles, names, lists and biographies, is devoted to the four following centuries, during which enterprising and cultured publishers, first in Italy and later in the Netherlands, France and England, brought out maps which were steadily more accurate, scientific and artistic representations of the changing world about them. The second part is a noteworthy attempt at an account of the mapping of whole countries and continents. England, and then Scotland and Ireland, Africa, Asia, America and Australia, are each given a chapter in which are enumerated all the notable maps and charts made of them since the earliest times. The historical section contains many confusions, contradictions, misprints and even mistakes. such as calling Ziegler's Palestine the first printed map to show magnetic variation, deriving Mercator's and van den Keere's maps of Ireland from lloazio's, when the reverse was the truth, and describing Halley as " the first to compile mortality tables."
But it would be unfair to judge this writer as a historian. If he sometimes assumes that role (and some of the brief introductions to his chapters are excellent), it is mainly to ensure system in his chronicle and order in his massed cohorts of maps. The very abundance of his material precludes any leisurely treatment of it. Preferring distance to wayside exploration, he can only give the most cursory description of any map, however important, and has to leave out far more than he includes. He has no space, for instance, for those doughty craftsmen, the surveyors, draughtsmen, calligraphers, copper engravers, colourists and decorators, whose work, representing the ideas and fashions of their time, gives 11 early maps a human background and the charm of period ornament.
Too much, however, must not be demanded of a work which is a guide to published maps rather than to cartography. No book quite like.Maps and Map Makers, nor so useful in its way, has ever been published in England. Nor haver we any work on this subject so well or so generously illustrated, for it contains nearly a hundred large plates, several of them in colour. It has come very opportunely. For the amateur, interested in further study, it provides numerous special bibliographies of works on early maps and for the expert a handy reference book in which are listed the chief productions of all the great map-publishers from de Turre to Wyld, most of the rare or unique maps, with their present location and, for specialists in England, the marine atlases and charts describing our own waters, coasts and harbours back to 1588. And for some who have never pored over an old map it may lead to the discovery of new lands of imaginative adventure
EDWARD LYNAM.
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