Two of the most memorable books I’ve read in the last few years are atlases. Together they are part of an exciting trend I’ve noticed, the use of maps not just as a source of information, but as a storytelling medium in their own right.

Obi Kaufman’s California Field Atlas is a book like no other. Kaufman is a watercolor artist and his gorgeous, simplified maps are rendered in that medium alongside stylized imagery of plants and animals found across the state with descriptions of place, habitat, and environment. Mostly gone from his maps are major highways, cities, and boundaries, which may only be rendered as a thin line or dot if at all. In doing so, Kaufman depicts a California of long past, or perhaps distance future, where the natural world reigns. To paraphrase a Terry Pratchet quote, it ain’t what California looks like, it what California be.

Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will is equally remarkable. Each of the featured islands is illustrated with a gorgeous map, presented with basic geographic information, and is followed by a short description of some formative story of the island’s past. The artwork and design of this book alone make it worth reading, but Schalansky’s writing takes this one to another level. In a couple of paragraphs, Schalansky weaves worlds just as rich as Narnia or Middle Earth, yet each story is based on fact and each island is a real place. Schalansky turns the factual into a whimsical world of wonder and for that deserves high praise.

I am continually drawn to a quote from the end of the introduction of the pocket atlas:

“It’s high time for cartography to take its place among the arts, and for the atlas to be recognized as literature, for its more than worthy of its original name: theatrum orbis terranum, the theatre of the world.

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken, as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits – the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than the satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.”

– Judith Schalansky