“What are the best map and cartography books?” We looked at 11 lists and came away with 141 different books perfect for any lover of the craft.

Maps, like the human beings who create them, have evolved and grown more complicated as time goes on. Maps have progressed from their early days of charting and making sense of land and the sky. Now maps can be used for almost anything, you can make a map of the human mind, the interconnectedness of communities, the internet, and even galaxies. As a cheesy or over-earnest teacher might say “The only limit to creating new and exciting maps is your imagination”.

Below you will find 141 of the best books about maps, cartography, map makers, map design and every creative map you can think of. The top 13 books appearing on multiple lists can be found with images and link below and the remaining 128 (as well as the sources we consulted) can be found at the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Best Map and Cartography Books

13.) An Atlas of Radical Cartography by Lize Mogel

Lists It Appears On:

• Bellerby And Co
• Brain Pickings

An Atlas of Radical Cartography makes an important contribution to a growing cultural movement that traverses the boundaries between art, cartography, geography and activism. It pairs writers with artists, architects, designers and collectives to address the role of the map as political agent (rather than neutral document). Ten mapping projects dealing with social and political issues such as migration, incarceration, globalization, housing rights, garbage and energy issues are complemented by 10 critical essays and dialogues responding to each map.

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12.) Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg

Lists It Appears On:

• Brain Pickings
• Wired

Now in Paperback! What does history look like? How do you draw time? Cartographies of Time is the first history of the timeline, written engagingly and with incredible visuals. The authors, both accomplished writers and historians, sketch the shifting field of graphic representations of history from the beginning of the print age through the present. They shed light on western views of history and on the complex relationship between general ideas about the course of events and the technical efforts to record and connect dates and names in the past. In addition to telling a rich, forgotten story, this book serves as a kind of grammar of historical representation, uncovering the ways in which time has been structured in thought and in images, in the Western tradition. Written for both the academically curious and the general reader, Cartographies of Time provides a set of tools for understanding the evolution and the significance of graphic representations of time both in history and in contemporary culture.

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11.) How To Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier

Lists It Appears On:

• Gretchen Peterson
• Wired

Originally published to wide acclaim, this lively, cleverly illustrated essay on the use and abuse of maps teaches us how to evaluate maps critically and promotes a healthy skepticism about these easy-to-manipulate models of reality. Monmonier shows that, despite their immense value, maps lie. In fact, they must.

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10.) Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS by John Krygier and Denis Wood

Lists It Appears On:

• Fantom Planet
• Wired

Acclaimed for its innovative use of visual material, this book is engaging, clear, and compelling—exactly how an effective map should be. Nearly every page is organized around maps and other figures (many in full color) that illustrate all aspects of map making, including instructive examples of both good and poor design choices. The book covers everything from locating and processing data to making decisions about layout, symbols, color, and type. Readers are invited to think critically about both the technical features and social significance of maps as they learn to create better maps of their own.

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9.) Map As Art, The: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography by Katharine Harmon

Lists It Appears On:

• Brain Pickings
• The New York Times

It is little surprise that in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology contemporary artists are drawn to mapsto express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free ofgeographical constraints. In The Map as Art, Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artists—such as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz—and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art. Essays by Gayle Clemans bring an in-depth look into the artists’ maps of Joyce Kozloff, Landon Mackenzie, Ingrid Calame, Guillermo Kuitca, and Maya Lin. Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this an essential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths.

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8.) The Map Book by Peter Barber

Lists It Appears On:

• Gretchen Peterson
• Map History

From the earliest of times, maps have fired our imaginations and helped us make sense of our world, from the global to the very local. Head of Map Collections at the British Library, Peter Barber has here compiled an historic and lavish atlas, charting the progress of civilization as our knowledge of the world expanded. Simply organized as a progression through time, The Map Book collects some 175 maps that span four millennia – from the famed prehistoric Bedolina (Italy) incision in rock from around 1500 B.C. to the most modern, digitally enhanced rendering. Many of the maos are beautiful works of art in their own right. From Europe to the Americas, Africa to Asia, north to south, there are maps of oceans and continents charted by heroic adventurers sailing into the unknown, as accounts spread of new discoveries, shadowy continents begin to appear n the margins of the world, often labeled ‘unknown lands.’ Other maps had a more practical use: some demarcated national boundaries or individual plots of land; military plans depicted enemy positions; propaganda treatises showed one country or faction at an advantage over others.

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7.) The Mapmakers: The Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography – from Antiquity to the Space Age by John Noble Wilford

Lists It Appears On:

• Wired
• Map History

In his classic text, two-time Pulitzer Prize—winner John Noble Wilford recounts the history of cartography from antiquity to the space age. With this revised edition, Wilford brings the story up to the present day, as he shows the impact of new technologies that make it possible for cartographers to go where no one has been before, from the deepest reaches of the universe (where astronomers are mapping time as well as space) to the inside of the human brain. These modern-day mapmakers join the many earlier adventurers–including ancient Greek stargazers, Renaissance seafarers, and the explorers who mapped the American West–whose exploits shape this dramatic story of human inventiveness and limitless curiosity.

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6.) Times Atlas of the World by Times Books

Lists It Appears On:

• Independent
• About

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World continues to be the benchmark of cartographic excellence, relied on and trusted by governments, media companies, and international organizations around the world including the UN and the European Commission. New features include a double page map of the Arctic Ocean, new maps of sub-ice features in the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic, and physical maps of all the continents. Major updates include 5,000 place name changes, most notably in Iran, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, and Spain; a beautifully illustrated section on current issues from climate to economy; updated national parks and conserved areas including the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA), the largest conservation zone in the world; and towns and populations in Brazil and Japan.

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5.) You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katherine Harmon

Lists It Appears On:

• Brain Pickings
• Wired

Mapmaking fulfills one of our most ancient and deepseated desires: understanding the world around us and our place in it. But maps need not just show continents and oceans: there are maps to heaven and hell; to happiness and despair; maps of moods, matrimony, and mythological places. There are maps to popular culture, from Gulliver’s Island to Gilligan’s Island. There are speculative maps of the world before it was known, and maps to secret places known only to the mapmaker. Artists’ maps show another kind of uncharted realm: the imagination. What all these maps have in common is their creators’ willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of geography or convention.

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4.) From Here To There by Hand Drawn Map Association

Lists It Appears On:

• Bellerby And Co
• Brain Pickings
• Wired

From Here to There celebrates these ephemeral documentsusually forgotten or tossed aside after having served their purposegiving them their due as artifacts representing stories from people’s lives around the world. There is the young woman suffering from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis who created maps of the Humira injections on her stomach and thighs to help her remember the sites, and give them time to heal. Or the young boy who imagined a whole country for ants and put it to paper. Lucas from Australia drew an obsessively detailed map of his local traffic island, and a teenage girl contributed a map of her high school locker. Two American tourists got lost in the Bulgarian mountains following the hand drawn map of a local, and Britanny from Denmark drew directions to an animal rights protest in Copenhagen. The maps featured in From Here to There are as varied and touching as the stories they tell.

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3.) On The Map : Why The World Looks The Way It Does by Simon Garfield

Lists It Appears On:

• Bellerby And Co
• Here 360
• Map History

Imagine a world without maps. How would we travel? Could we own land? What would men and women argue about in cars? Scientists have even suggested that mapping—not language—is what elevated our prehistoric ancestors from ape-dom. Follow the history of maps from the early explorers’ maps and the awe-inspiring medieval Mappa Mundi to Google Maps and the satellite renderings on our smartphones, Garfield explores the unique way that maps relate and realign our history—and reflect the best and worst of what makes us human.

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1. (Tie)  A History of the World in Twelve Maps by Jerry Brotton

Lists It Appears On:

• Bellerby And Co
• Here 360
• Map History
• Wired

Maps are objects of endless fascination, and the urge to map is a basic human instinct. In this masterful study, historian and cartography expert Jerry Brotton reveals how maps—far from being objective documents—are intimately tied to the views and agendas of particular times and places. Beginning with Ptolemy’s Geography and ending with the satellite-powered behemoth of Google Earth, Brotton examines a dozen world maps from around the globe and through the centuries to trace the long road to our present geographical reality.

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1. (Tie) Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs

Lists It Appears On:

• Bellerby And Co
• Brain Pickings
• Gretchen Peterson
• The New York Times

Spanning many centuries, all continents, and the realms of outer space and the imagination, this collection of 138 unique graphics combines beautiful full-color illustrations with quirky statistics and smart social commentary. The result is a distinctive illustrated guide to the world.

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The Best Map and Cartography Books

Books 14-141 (Appear on 1 list each)

The Best Cartography Book Sources