Maps: Their Untold Stories

Every map tells a story — not only the geographical story of the territory it represents, but the story of the person who made it, the world they lived in, and the assumptions they could not see around. DK’s Maps: Their Untold Stories explores fifty of the most extraordinary maps ever made, reading each one as a cultural document that reveals as much about its creator and their world as it does about the geography it depicts — the Mappa Mundi with Jerusalem at its centre, the first map to name America, the aerial photography that revealed the extent of London’s wartime damage.

Each map is presented in full colour with expert annotation that draws out its secrets — the political assumptions embedded in its projections, the knowledge gaps revealed by its errors, the stories encoded in its iconography.

A beautiful and endlessly fascinating celebration of cartography as one of humanity’s most revealing art forms. Published by DK.