The Atlas of Atlases: Exploring the Most Important Atlases in History and the Cartographers Who Made Them by Philip Parker

Can’t decide if it’s a coffee-table book or a textbook

Ivy Press publishes a series of books on bibliographic history called Liber Historica, which as of now consists of seven volumes. I have previously read and reviewed two books from this series, Scientifica Historica and The Philosopher’s Library, about the history of science and philosophy books, respectively. Having an avid interest in book history, I liked this series enough to come back for more, and as a map enthusiast I was eager to lay my hands on The Atlas of Atlases, published in 2022. Although the title indicates that this book is about the history of atlases (because Atlas of Atlases sounds cool), the book actually covers the entire history of cartography, not just maps bound into book form. Book-length atlases didn’t really exist before the mid-16th century. This book, however, starts with the first topographical lines scratched into a prehistoric rock and ends with Google Maps and other online geographic information systems.

All of the books in the Liber Historica series are in a mini-coffee-table size (8" x 9.5") and loaded with scores of color illustrations. It’s not just a series of picture books, however. Each volume also contains a full-length scholarly monograph on its subject. In the case of The Atlas of Atlases, the text by Philip Parker is a long and difficult slog. While Parker certainly provides a sufficient history of maps an atlases, he tries too hard to sum up practically the entire history of the Western World in 270 pages. Each map presented gets a paragraph or two of description crammed with names and dates—not just who made the atlas but who financed it, to whom it was dedicated, who was king or pope at the time, and what wars were going on. There’s nothing wrong with what Parker has to say (unlike The Philosopher’s Library, where I thought there were plenty of problems with the text). The way he says it, however, often put me to sleep. This is a case where I definitely would have preferred less text and more images. A chronological list of important maps and atlases with some pertinent facts about each would have been enough for me, rather than this dense prose narrative in paragraph form. John Noble Wilford’s The Mapmakers is a better history of cartography—more comprehensive and more pleasant to read—but that book doesn’t have all of the beautiful color illustrations that adorn The Atlas of Atlases.

The 8" x 9.5" page size was fine for Liber Historica’s other books, but it doesn’t really do justice to many of these maps. Because there’s so much text, most of the illustrations aren’t even full page size. The reproduction quality is very good, but the images are just too small to make out much detail. The best use of this book is to bring your attention to landmark maps and atlases that you can then look up elsewhere. Everything prior to the 20th century is probably digitized online somewhere (Try the David Rumsey Map Collection).

From what I’ve seen so far of the Liber Historica series, the initial flagship volume, Scientifica Historica, is still the best book in the bunch. I do like the Atlas of Atlases, however, more than The Philosopher’s Library. In general, if you like books about books, these volumes will make nice additions to your shelves, and they are rather inexpensive for the production quality that you’re getting. Recent additions to the series include The Botanist’s Library, The Astronomer’s Library, and The Mathematician’s Library.

The Purple Land by W. H. Hudson

An Englishman’s adventures in Uruguay

William Henry Hudson (1841–1922) was born and raised in Argentina. His parents were immigrants of English and Irish origin. At the age of 32, Hudson emigrated to England, became a British citizen, and started a literary career. He wrote many books about South America, both fiction and nonfiction. He was also an ornithologist and published numerous books on birds and nature. Hudson made his authorial debut in 1885 with his novel The Purple Land. From the preface, however, it sounds like the book was not widely read until a couple decades later when Hudson hit it big with another novel, Green Mansions.

Richard Lamb is an Englishman in Argentina who falls in love with a local girl named Paquíta. They elope against her parents’ wishes and flee from Buenos Aires to escape persecution. They cross the Río de la Plata to Montevideo, in Uruguay, where they temporarily take up residence with an aunt of Paquíta’s. Lamb has trouble finding work in the city and decides to venture off on his own into the countryside in hopes of finding work at an estancia (ranch or farm). This was a time when a traveler (at least an Englishman) coming upon a country house could expect to find hospitality, food, and shelter. As a result, Lamb doesn’t really do much work at all, but he does visit several different estancias where he is welcomed with mostly open arms. Along the way he lives a bit of the gaucho life, gets involved in a revolution, and experiences other adventures.

Hudson provides some historical context in a brief appendix. You’d be better off reading that first. At the time of this novel, Uruguay was governed by the Colorados (a.k.a. the Reds, liberals). This follows a long period of Civil War against the Blancos (a.k.a. the Whites, conservatives), who continue their rebellious resistance against the Red regime. The “Purple Land” of the title refers to the region being “so stained with the blood of her children.” The territory that now comprises Uruguay was also known as the Banda Orientál. Hudson uses the word “Oriental” quite a bit throughout the book. Here it simply means “Eastern,” as in Eastern South America, east of the Río de la Plata. Hudson also mentions ostriches several times in this novel. Although he was an ornithologist who should know better, I think he’s referring to the native rhea, which at the time might have been more commonly referred to as the “South American ostrich.”

Even more so than many inappropriate writers of the Victorian era, Hudson had a thing for young girls. I haven’t come across a book of his yet where some adult male isn’t romancing a girl of 14 or 15 (Hudson was 44 when this book was published). Even though Lamb is a newlywed, he’s constantly on the lookout for another woman, the younger the better. Such unfaithful behavior is unusual for a “gentleman” protagonist in British literature of this era, but Lamb falls in love with four or five girls or women over the course of this novel. The puritanical conventions of the Victorian novel, however, prevent him from getting very far with his infidelities.

I have read three other books by Hudson and found them mediocre at best, but I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The contents of this novel read like an assortment of Hudson’s own experiences, second-hand stories, and folklore. Every time Lamb moves to a different estancia, it’s like starting a new short story, which may last two, three, or several chapters. One of the more memorable chapters is just a half dozen guys sitting around a campfire telling tall tales and ghost stories. Hudson succeeds in providing the reader with colorful and revealing glimpses into Uruguayan life and culture. This not only works for “tourist” readers like me; this novel has even been praised by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, and Ezra Pound were all fans of Hudson’s work, and after reading The Purple Land, I can kind of understand why.

A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

The Citizen Kane of spy novels

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is a highly respected British author of spy novels whose career spanned almost half a century. A Coffin for Dimitrios, often regarded as his finest work, was published in 1939. The book has also been published as The Mask of Dimitrios, which is the title of the 1944 film adaptation starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.

Englishman Charles Latimer is a former professor of political economy turned successful writer of mystery novels. While vacationing in Istanbul he meets a Colonel Haki of the Turkish police, who happens to be a fan of his work. As the two get to talking, Haki tells Latimer about an infamous criminal named Dimitrios whose body was discovered in the Bosporus Strait. Given Latimer’s interest in crime and detective work, Haki asks Latimer if he’d like to go to the morgue to view the body. Latimer agrees. The more the writer learns about Dimitrios’s criminal career, the more intrigued he becomes. He decides to investigate Dimitrios’s past, with the idea that he might discover something that would be useful for a future novel. Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s known whereabouts, traveling from city to city looking through police records and interviewing people with some knowledge of the notorious criminal. Along the way, Latimer finds that someone else has been following the same trail and making similar inquiries into Dimitrios’s past.

The plot of the book calls to mind the classic film Citizen Kane in that the title character is dead in the opening scene, and the rest of the book is a series of glimpses into his past. Through his investigation of Dimitrios’s life, Latimer uncovers a history of espionage, drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. These crimes are revealed almost as a series of short stories, told to Latimer by various law enforcement personnel and unsavory characters. Ambler ties these fictional flashbacks into real-life political intrigue of Europe’s interwar period. The drawback to this series of flashbacks, however, is that Latimer is never really in any danger until at least two-thirds of the way through the book. He’s not really doing any ingenious detective work, either, but rather just listening to stories that are voluntarily related to him.

There are two kinds of spy thrillers. One includes those of the highly skilled, expertly trained, killing-machine sort of hero (e.g. James Bond, Jason Bourne). The other is that of the regular guy who accidentally gets involved in an espionage plot (e.g. just about every Alfred Hitchcock movie). A Coffin for Dimitrios falls into the latter category. The problem with the regular-guy approach, however, is that if you’re regular guy is too regular, he ends up being just boring. Such is the case with Latimer, who doesn’t have much of a personality at all. He is also still somewhat bound by the literary conventions of the English gentleman, which means he’s predictably going to do the right thing. It would be interesting to see what an author like Georges Simenon could have done with this premise by adding some ungentlemanly moral ambiguity.

Overall, however, I enjoyed this novel enough to make me want to read some more of Ambler’s work. This is an intelligent, realistic espionage thriller in the vein of John Le Carré’s work. It’s not simplistic potboiler pulp fiction, but it reads very briskly and lively and doesn’t get bogged down in too much political details (unlike, perhaps, some of Le Carré’s work). If you like those old Hitchcockian thrillers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science by Jim Endersby

How natural science was conducted in Darwin’s day

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an important figure in the history of botany and in British science in general. He was a close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, and the two exchanged over 1300 letters. In a career move similar to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, young Hooker served as naturalist on the ship Erebus in its exploration of the Antarctic and many Southern islands. Joseph’s father, William Hooker, was the founding director of the Kew Gardens, and Joseph succeeded his father in that post in 1865. Although he may have started out as a nepo baby, Joseph’s accomplishments in botany eventually surpassed those of his father. In his 2008 book Imperial Nature, science historian Jim Endersby looks at Hooker’s life and what it reveals about science and scientists in Victorian England.

As Endersby soon admits in his introduction, this is not a full biography of Joseph Hooker. Rather, it focuses on a specific period in Hooker’s early career, from the late 1830s to the mid-1860s. Endersby’s research is drawn largely from letters and publications of that period. Though he focuses primarily on Hooker, Endersby provides a broader view of how natural science was conducted in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. What he reveals on this subject could be applied to just about any of Hooker’s British contemporaries studying biology at this time, including his father William Hooker, Darwin, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Edward Forbes, Asa Gray, John Lindley, Richard Owen, and Hewett Cottrell Watson—all of whom are discussed frequently in the book.

Endersby provides much interesting insight into how these botanists practiced their profession—collecting, preserving, classifying, drawing, writing, and publishing—but he also reveals much about the social status of science and scientists at this time. During this period in history, science was largely the domain of independently wealthy “gentlemen.” Conducting science for money was considered crass and menial. Even medical doctors were looked down on as lowly blue-collar laborers. Hooker, however, needed to earn a living, so he had to navigate the difficult transition from aristocratic “men of science” to professional “scientists” that took place in the 19th century. Even the word “professional” was considered derogatory; Hooker and his colleagues preferred to be called “philosophical” botanists.

In his leadership role at Kew, with its extensive herbarium (collection of plants), Hooker was the foremost authority on botanical matters, such as naming plant species, in the British empire, if not the world. As Endersby describes him, Hooker was somewhat of a dictator over his domain. Endersby closely examines the relationships between metropolitan (London) and colonial (e.g. Australia, India) botanists. During his Erebus voyage, Hooker met two skilled amateur plant collectors, William Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania. For decades thereafter, these two men supplied Hooker and Kew with dried and preserved plants from these islands, which Hooker then analyzed, classified, and described in his botanical books. Through a deep dive into their correspondence, Endersby shows how Hooker was dependent on these colonial collectors but also strove to keep them in their place, asserting himself as the real botanist and big-city authority while condescendingly quashing their ideas.

I enjoy reading biographies and histories about the glory days of the naturalist explorer, so I found Endersby’s book quite interesting and informative. I will caution the reader, however, that Imperial Nature reads very much like a dissertation or a scholarly treatise intended to win over fellow historians or a tenure committee, not a general audience. There is much repetition in the text, frequent hair-splitting, and a lot of cross-referencing from one chapter to another. Endersby cites nine examples to defend a point he’s making, when three would have sufficed for the general reader. It’s very workmanlike prose, but Endersby delivers the goods. Those who are interested in the way these nineteenth-century scientists plied their trade will certainly learn plenty here.

Small Souls by Louis Couperus

Compelling start to a Dutch family saga

Name a Dutch author. I dare you. If you’re an American, chances are it’ll be Anne Frank or maybe Spinoza. Not much Dutch literature has been available to English-language readers, although there has been an increase in the last few decades. One notable Dutch author, however, did enjoy worldwide success in the early 20th century: Louis Couperus. His novel Small Souls was first published in 1901, then came out in English in 1914. It is the first of four books in a series also called Small Souls.

The Van Lowe family lives in The Hague. The family patriarch, “Papa” van Lowe, is deceased when the novel opens. He is survived by his widow, eight children, and numerous grandchildren. The elder Van Lowe was formerly the Dutch governor general of the colony of Java, a very prestigious position through which he might occasionally rub elbows with the King and Queen. None of Papa’s children, however, have quite lived up to his level of distinction. The eight Van Lowe siblings now find themselves in varying levels of social status and class, which sometimes inspires envy and resentment among them. Because they’re well-to-do, they spend most of their time visiting one another, throwing parties, criticizing and gossiping about each other. (Some of the men have careers, but we don’t really see them at work.) Twenty years ago, one daughter, Constance, married a diplomat forty years her senior. She cheated on her husband with one of his subordinates, causing a divorce and a scandal that forced her and her lover to flee to Brussels. Now, after 15 years in exile, she has returned to The Hague to reconnect with her family and her homeland, but not everyone is willing to overlook her shameful past.

Small Souls reminds me of British author John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (I have only read the first book in that series). In both cases, the reader is introduced to a large, rather wealthy family. An extramarital scandal threatens the family’s respectability, and the various siblings all have deep-seated beefs against one another. Often these squabbles feel like much ado over rich people problems.

What makes Small Souls interesting, however, is its quintessential Dutchness. There are thousands of novels set in London, but The Hague? In English, hardly any. Couperus’s novels provide a welcome look into Dutch life, one unique aspect of which is the Netherlands’ relationship to its colonies in Indonesia. The East Indies played an important role in the Dutch economy. The Van Lowe children grew up in Java, and the family still has agricultural interests on the island. In this novel, the adjective “Indian” is used to describe anyone or anything from Java. Couperus’s writing also exhibits a sensibility that’s more Northern than Western European. There’s an understated yet authentic psychological sensitivity here that reads more like the writings of Scandinavian authors such as Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Henrik Ibsen than that of English or French novelists.

Much like Galsworthy’s Forsytes, the difficult aspect of reading Small Souls is just getting a grasp on the huge roster of Van Lowes. One really needs to chart out a family tree to keep them all straight. Since I couldn’t find hardly any information on this novel online, I’ve done that for you (image attached below). As a member of a large family myself, I found Couperus’s depiction of brother-sister, parent-child, and husband-wife relationships quite authentic and insightful. As the first novel in a tetralogy, much of Small Souls is spent introducing us to this clan, thus setting the stage for further developments in the subsequent novels. I found myself thoroughly engaged in the Van Lowe family dynamics, enough to make we want to follow their fortunes through the next three books: The Later Life, Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan.

Van Lowe family tree (click to enlarge)

A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific by Robert M. Utley

Exciting adventures of the American West rendered confusing and dull

I’m a frequent tourist visitor to the state of Wyoming, where many locations are named after legendary mountain men: Colter Bay, Sublette County, Hoback Junction, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and even Jedediah’s House of Sourdough. Over the past two decades of venturing out that way, I had gleaned a few details about these historical characters. I was really looking for an authoritative history to provide a more comprehensive education on the lives and accomplishments of these intrepid adventurers, when I came across A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of mountain men by Robert M. Utley, former historian for the National Park Service.

Utley begins his history with the Lewis and Clark expedition. He focuses not on the two captains, however, but rather on two members of their crew: John Colter and George Drouillard, who remained in the West to become pioneering fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains. Utley then charts the profession of mountain man from the beaver-trapping industry to wagon train trail guides to government-commissioned explorers and cartographers. The book closes with the annexation of the West Coast territories into the United States, which some of these mountain men helped bring about. Even though you root for and admire these bold explorers, it is quite depressing to realize that much of this history was inspired by the pointless extermination of the beaver species just to make fashionable hats. Published in 1997, this book probably isn’t “woke” enough for today’s standards in the field of history, but any book on mountain men is going to glorify manifest destiny to some extent. Utley doesn’t treat Native Americans as evil villains in this book, but rather as obstacles that needed to be overcome. Critics might scold Utley for not telling the Indian side of the story, but really that would belong in another and different book than this.

Though eager to learn about this subject, I found A Life Wild and Perilous frequently confusing and consistently dull. Utley is a highly respected historian, so I’m sure the book is well-researched­. He has drawn widely and deeply from the diaries and published exploits of many historical figures. I don’t doubt the accuracy of his facts, but his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. While no doubt these mountain men had some exciting adventures, the text is mostly, “This guy went here. That guy went there,” over and over again in an exhausting morass of detail. The table of contents makes you think that Utley will be focusing on one or two famous mountain men in each chapter, but that’s not the case. In each chapter, he’ll drop the names of forty or fifty of these trappers, their stories all jumbled up together, and you’re expected to keep them all straight. As a prose stylist, Utley has a way of phrasing a sentence that makes you think, “What exactly did he just say?” and requires frequent backtracks and rereads.

It’s also difficult for the reader to orient himself geographically. There are very few maps in the ebook, and they are pretty useless when reading on the Kindle. (The print edition might have more maps; I don’t know.) In keeping with the frontier times he’s discussing, when state boundaries and most towns as we know them today had not yet been established, Utley denotes locations by rivers and mountain ranges. The result is that the reader better have a very firm knowledge of the topography of the American West, or you’re going to get lost. It would have been quite helpful if once in a while Utley threw the reader a bone with a comment like, “near present-day Driggs, Idaho,” but no; he never does.

A Life Wild and Perilous is packed with data, particularly on who was where and when, but because of Utley’s confusing way of relating these facts, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much. All the information is there, it’s just difficult to process. This would be a fine reference work for looking up specific historical details, and that’s pretty much how it reads. As a linear narrative, it’s not very user-friendly at all.

The Cabin by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Short but powerful naturalist novel of Spain

Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) published his fifth novel, La Barraca, in 1898. In English, the book is titled The Cabin or The Shack. The novel takes place in a huerta, or farming community, outside the city of Valencia, which is located on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. The farmers who comprise the novel’s cast do not own the land on which they live and work. They rent from a landlord who lives in the city. Most of the families in the huerta are struggling to make ends meet, and many owe debts and back rent to the landowner.

In the opening chapter, Pepeta, a farmwife, brings her goods to market in Valencia. In the city, she runs into a former neighbor who is now a prostitute. Pepeta remembers when this young woman was once a respectable farmer’s daughter. This inspires a flashback to a momentous event in the history of the huerta. A poor, hardworking farmer named Barret (the prostitute’s father) suffers the persecution of his oppressive landlord, Don Salvador, which leads to a violent altercation between peasant and master. The Barrets are driven from their land, leaving their farm and its barraca vacant for many years. The other residents of the huerta see this unoccupied, unproductive land as a symbol of rebellious pride, a thorn in the side of the rich landowners. One day, however, a new family appears at the huerta, their belongings in tow. To everyone’s surprise, the newcomers take up residence on the old Barret farm. Much like scabs would be viewed by strikers, these interlopers are treated with hostility and animosity by their neighbors. Although the new resident, Batiste, is just a poor and industrious farmer struggling to succeed like everyone else, he and his family are shunned and antagonized by the other families of the huerta.

Though largely forgotten by American readers these days (who would be hard-pressed to name any Spanish novel other than Don Quixote), Blasco Ibáñez was highly respected and widely read by English-language readers and critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The English edition of The Cabin alone sold over a million copies. Blasco Ibáñez wrote in the style of naturalism that was forged and popularized decades earlier by French author Émile Zola. In fact, Blasco Ibáñez is the first author I’ve come across who can do Zola’s style as well as Zola himself. That’s not to say that the Spanish author is merely an imitator of his predecessor. Active roughly a quarter century after Zola, Blasco Ibáñez brings naturalism into the modern world of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Naturalism is a form of realism that aims to document modern life in rich detail and unflinching verisimilitude without shying away from subject matter traditionally considered difficult, ugly, or unseemly. Drawing from modern science and social science, naturalism generally depicts its characters as not being masters of their own destiny but rather as slaves to forces of nature and nurture—evolution, heredity, economics, politics—that shape their identities and influence the course of their lives. This is apparent in La Barraca as animosity and violence escalate the Barrets and their neighbors, when everyone’s real enemy is the system of feudalistic peonage that enslaves them.

The joy of reading old books by dead guys is that every once in a while you discover a writer whose work you really love, and that author has twenty or thirty books that you’ve never heard of that you can now look forward to reading. Such is the case with Blasco Ibáñez, my latest discovery. The Cabin is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and both have been excellent. This is a short novel, smaller in size and more intimate in scale than his epic The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, but a lot of emotional power is packed into this small package.