Paper: An Elegy. Ian Sansom

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      Map illustrating a historical event

      Kibera is a massive slum in Nairobi, Kenya: estimates of its population range from 200,000 to more than a million. In 2008 the independent Map Kibera Project, organised by an Italian academic, Stefano Marras, began mapping Kibera using the Walking Papers method, with the aim of producing reliable, up-to-date maps for use by the inhabitants of this ever-changing city. Local children are trained in basic GPS technology, in order to be able to capture the geographical data of an area using handheld devices, and organisers and volunteers then print off A1-size maps using this data so that others can then use tracing paper and sets of coloured markers to add important details such as the location of markets, sewers, pathways and streams. This marked-up paper map is then photographed and copied to a computer, the original map is updated, and large numbers of the maps printed for distribution: a dynamic digital-paper-digital-paper flow.

      This collaborative, hybrid form of digital/paper mapping has also been used successfully in disaster zones: in 2010 in the Pakistan floods, after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011, and currently in Haiti. Arguably there has been no enterprise quite like it since the English Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) produced their cheap maps for working people – sold for a shilling – in the early to mid-1800s, and even then there was of course no sense in which the readers of the SDUK maps were also the producers. The hierarchical model of geographical data collection and distribution may have changed, but paper still has a role to play in the digital era: machines may make maps, but machines still run on paper.

      Between the first maps being drawn in the sand and the new Golden Age of Google and OSM neo-cartography there have been centuries of men and women making maps not only on paper but on just about any kind of material, including stone, wood, and in the famous case of Charlemagne, plates of solid silver. Everyone knows that the first printed map in the Western world appeared in a 1472 edition of the dictionary of St Isidore of Seville, and everyone knows it was the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator who in the late sixteenth century began making maps using a projection based on latitude and longitude (the considerable advantage of which is that it makes navigation easier, the considerable disadvantage of which is that it makes Greenland look bigger than China, and Europe bigger than South America). But not everyone knows the story of Mercator’s contemporary, Abraham Ortels, of Antwerp – printer, bookseller, print-dealer and ‘afsetter van carten’, decorator of maps – who was one of the first great entrepreneurial mapmakers, and who pipped Mercator to the post by creating the first modern paper atlas.

      The story goes that sometime in the mid-1500s a rich Antwerp merchant was complaining to a friend about the state of contemporary maps: the big ones were too large and unwieldy, the small ones could hardly be read at all. How big were the big ones? They were enormous. Martin Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographiae Descriptio in Plano, for example, published to accompany his Cosmographiae Introductio (1507) – which was, incidentally, the first map to bear the word ‘America’ – was printed on multiple sheets which, pasted together, would make a map of about thirty-six square feet. These days, algorithms are used in the design and folding of large maps, and these methods have in turn been used to develop three-dimensional objects which can be folded from flat sheets, with both flat-pack furniture and production-line car parts evolving from the mathematical rules for folding paper. But in sixteenth-century Antwerp there was no flat-pack furniture and there were no handy algorithms, so the merchant’s friend mentioned his complaint to a gifted young map illuminator, Abraham Ortels – known as Ortelius – to see if he could assist. Ortelius made up a volume of about thirty maps for the merchant, sensible and uniform in size, and being young and ambitious, he realised that there was more in this than just a one-off commission: this was his big opportunity. He began collecting and editing more maps, and engraving plates of his own, and had them printed and bound, and after a mere ten years of hard work, on 20 May 1570, the first edition of the first modern atlas was published. Its title: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World); seventy maps on fifty-three copper-plate printed sheets, thirty-five pages of text, price 6fl 10st. The Theatrum was really an amazing piece of art – Ortelius was friends with Peter Brueghel the Elder and was an early collector of the work of Dürer – but it was also profoundly practical. Portable, readable, reliable, affordable. A second edition was produced within three months, a Dutch edition in 1571, with other editions and supplements soon to follow: scholars have estimated total sales of around 7,750 copies of the full atlas in its first few years of publication. The first edition of Mercator’s combined atlas – incorporating all his maps – wasn’t published until 1602, and although it soon eclipsed the Theatrum in popularity, Ortelius had got there first: the Theatrum is organised entirely as a modern atlas might be organised, beginning with a map of the world and continuing with maps of the continents, and then of various countries.

      What followed this sixteenth-century revolution in mapping and map technology, in the words of Lloyd A. Brown, in The Story of Maps (1950), was ‘the greatest real estate venture of all time’. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paper maps allowed groups and individuals not only to navigate, but also, crucially, to make plans for navigations and adventures, both great and small. What’s true for countries is true also for country estates. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, for example, was so-called because he could see the capabilities in a landscape; he could read it like a document, or a map. Explaining his method of garden design, Hannah More famously recounted how Brown would point a finger and announce, ‘“I make a comma and there,” pointing to another spot, “where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.”’ Using maps and surveys, estates could be managed, trees planted, and grand visions and ideas put into practice.

      Over the past five hundred years, paper has helped to create and define landscapes, peoples and nations. Maps have assisted and determined the colonial and military explorations of the Dutch, and the French, the commercial activities of the British East India Company, and countless other enterprises. (And as with space, so time was also colonised using paper, in the form of timelines, timetables, astronomical charts, genealogies СКАЧАТЬ