How To Lie With Maps

Co-ordinating Deceit

How To Lie With Maps
3rd Edition
by Mark Monmonier
The University Of Chicago Press
ISBN:  9780226435923

Just a quick shout out of a review to a pretty interesting and cool book I got given for Christmas by a very special friend. This is apparently the third edition of Mark Monmonier’s book How To Lie With Maps and it starts off with an introduction by the author as to why a revised edition is actually needed... which of course takes into account such things as digital/interactive maps and then, just for a little while, falls into what I like to call ‘the academic trap’, by setting out what the book intends to do. Personally, I could do without this element of telling before you show but, hey ho, academics!

It is, however, an excellent book and it certainly does what it says on the tin... or in this case what it shows on the front cover, which features a wonderful illustration of a map showing a big area coloured up to represent the silhouette of Pinocchio. Which is a nice touch.

The book is a handy summary of the ways in which people not only lie regularly with maps, such as exaggerating what is in an area or using scale to showcase what is required by the cartographer’s client... but also looks at the ways in which maps deceive when that isn’t necessarily the intention of the map maker. And it even makes a very good point from early on that the very nature of a map means it is absolutely imperative to lie to effectively, or even adequately, communicate what is being depicted... and I suspect it’s damn near impossible not to. So, for example, a church icon would not, in real life, be a huge and massive building that big... it’s exaggerated for the map to clearly show its presence.

And there are certainly a whole host of falsehoods thrown up, some of which I’d certainly never considered. For instance, just the idea of a flat map representing an area of a spherical world means there is going to be some shonkiness with the representation unless you can find a way around that. And even the nature of the lenses used when taking ariel photographs means some hefty distortion is certainly going to occur when you finally see it as a flat image.

And all kinds of devious deceit is deliberately thrown up in terms of things like army propaganda (and how to mislead an enemy with your maps). An interesting set of maps of a certain section of Russia from different decades in each specific atlas shows places that shift location, for example. It also looks at the ways map makers get their source materials and how various cartographers may try to copy that. I’ve always known about things called ‘trap streets’, for example... the practice of putting in a place that doesn’t exist so if a rival map seller uses your copyrighted map as their source, you can easily call them on it. I didn’t know the correct name of them though and I also didn’t realise, due to legal precedents, that this practice had stopped sometime in the 1990s (Yay, I can start nicking maps again!). And the book is well written in a fairly entertaining manner too, such as on this very subject where the author states “The euphemism for this type of compilation was ‘editing the competition’ but the legal term is copyright infringement...”, which I thought was very good.

What I didn’t expect to find was a specific printing phenomenon which I’ve known about and tried to compensate and steer clear of for years, being as I’m a graphic designer by trade, can also lead to accidental occurrences of deceit. Bearing in mind grey scales can be used as a tool to give a hierarchy of information on a map (as well as colour versions too, of course), then it does make sense that something which I’ve always called ‘dot gain’ in printing (and something which the author calls spread), where a colour or shade comes out darker than required because of the actual act of ink pressing against paper, means you have to be extra careful about trying to control that element when you are printing a map. Not to mention choosing tones and colours that are able to retain that hierarchical meaning when they are photocopied and given to someone.

And I think I’ll stop here but, I have to say that I found How To Lie With Maps to be an absolutely fascinating read and it certainly gave me something new to think about. It will be of especial interest to those who make their trade in the arts of course (because making a map is certainly an art form in itself) but I think it’s a fascinating read whether you are familiar with the kinds of decisions and specifics required to build a map or not. Definitely worth a look, this one.