Quotes About Cartography

Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the entire world was depicted," wrote Bartolomé de las Casas

Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses

No less than the tourist, the writer of history profits from maps.

My first occupation was to map the country.

But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there.

When I glanced back up, a holoed globe of Hyperion ceased spinning and unwound itself into a series of flattened projections: oblique equirectangular, Bonne, orthographic, rosette, Van der Grinten, Gores, interrupted Goode homolosine, gnomonic, sinusoidal, azimuthal equidistant, polyconic, hypercorrected Kuwatsi, computer-eschered, Briesemeister, Buckminster, Miller cylindrical, multicoligraphed, and satplot standard, before resolving into a standard Robinson-Baird map of Hyperion.

A singular cartographic combatant led the charge—Bai Meichu, one of China's most influential and respected geographers.

There were only three names on the map of the region we had brought with us, but we now filled in more than two hundred.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?"So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,"They are merely conventional signs!"

The map? I will first make it.

Geography is the art of the mappable.

The map is more interesting than the territory.

Among the fables that inspired the British Admiralty's cartographic assignments to Captain James Cook in the 1770s and Captain George Vancouver in the 1790s was a 1640 account under the name of Bartholomew de Fonte that appeared in a journal with the delightful title 'The Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious.'

Maps gave them control over their surroundings, for the first time ever. It showed how to get from one place to another. It sounds simple now, but a thousand years ago it would have been an incredible feat of imagination and imagery. All maps are drawn as though looking down. From a bird's point of view. From their god's point of view. Imagine being the first person to think of that. To be able to wrap their minds around a perspective they'd never seen. And then draw it.

When we allow ourselves greater freedom in space and place than has come to be the norm, we create our own pathways of meaning and knowledge upon the land where we dwell. Wandering freely, we garner landmarks, presences, ecological awareness, a sense of kithship. Our brains and our hearts alike gather this knowledge as we become intimate with the paths that speak to us most strongly. Our footsteps in the outer world create an inner, wilder cartography that whispers, This way, this way…

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

The map is more interesting than the territory.

Maps codify the miracle of existence.