A good Atlas is hard to find
In “The Island of Lost Maps” [amtap amazon:asin=0767908260] Miles Harvey documents both the history of maps and the ever increasing value of cartographic collections today. I’m sure the publishers of Atlases have taken this to heart and consider their books as collectors items. Unlike our favourite book of road maps, an Atlas isn’t something you want to upgrade every year. When I was growing up my parents had a beautiful Reader’s Digest Atlas complete with illustrations of space and amazing pictures of the sea floor. Naturally the first place I went to look for an Atlas was Reader’s Digest . Well, it turns out you can’t view the pages online. I weighed up receiving junk mail from Reader’s Digest for the next 50 years and decided surely somebody else must produce a decent Atlas?
It was at this point my obsession with Atlases became almost like the characters in Harvey’s novel. I scoured bookshops and map shops trying to find the perfect Atlas. I used the South Island of New Zealand as my test case to measure the level of detail in each Atlas. Nothing under $200 seemed to match what I had in mind. Do not even get me started on the whole which “Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World” edition is best debate.[amtap amazon:asin=0007157207]
While we were looking at atlases in a map shop, I suddenly realised that what we wanted was not a World Atlas but simply a road atlas for Europe. For a fraction of the price we could get the required level of detail for route planning, including travel times! In the end we went with the Insight Travel Atlas, which is very similar to both the Michelin and Frommer’s versions. [amtap amazon:asin=2067129953][amtap amazon:asin=0764557823]
A short time after buying the road atlas, I came across a beautiful 1982 edition of the Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World in an Op shop for $5. It has a fairly good close up of the South Island in NZ and the pictures of space and the ocean floor. Admittedly it still has West and East Germany, but that in itself is a fascinating historical detail. If you want to see just how far we have come with maps and Atlases, another fascinating book is [amtap amazon:asin=1582974640]
