The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress

From renowned geographer James Cheshire, a four-color tour through the maps that made—and unmade—200 years of Western history.

Tucked just beyond a clutter of offices and a dusty lecture hall in the heart of London, there lies a turquoise door. Years ago, James Cheshire stepped through and was astonished by what he found: thousands of maps and hundreds of atlases, bulging from oak drawers and glass cabinets. It was a map library—an Aladdin’s cave of cartographic treasures.

In The Library of Lost Maps, Cheshire transports us to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the maps before him hung in government offices, sat on tables at company board meetings, and impacted the public in times of both hope and crisis. They revealed the beauty of the ocean floor; they identified oil stores. They told a story of a world ravaged by empire and doomed by climate change. But if maps hold the key to mistakes of our past, Cheshire reveals, then they might also open the door for change in our future.

Brimming with surprising discoveries and stunning four-color map reproductions, The Library of Lost Maps celebrates the power of maps for putting things in perspective, allowing us to see the world not only as it has been, but as it could be.

About the Author

James Cheshire is Director of University College London's Social Data and co-author of London: The Information Capital, Where the Animals Go and Atlas of the Invisible. The former President of the Society of Cartographers and currently an editor at The Cartographic Journal, he is the recipient of several major awards from the Royal Geographical Society, the American Association of Geographers, and the British Cartographic Society, among others. He lives in London.