WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation

The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts.

Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design.

The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field:

• more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs


• critical introductions by experienced experts in the field


• focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas


• a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts


• full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’


• fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research