[[linking to ]]

My goal was to give readers valuable insights about the varied role of maps in politics, science and society - and to have some fun along the way. Although cartographic history has its share of tragedy and violence, cartographic tales are often ironic and occasionally hilarious. I wrote Drawing the Line partly to complement an earlier book, How to Lie with Maps ... (2nd ed.,1996).Modeled after Darrell Huff's delightfully witty How to Lie with Statistics (1954),How to Lie with Maps uses numerous examples, mostly hypothetical, to show that while all maps tell small lies, some get away with whoppers. Maps are selective generalizations but most map readers, unaware of the choices available, seldom question the map author's motives. Accustomed to overlooking necessary little lies, they fail to challenge the big ones. The solution is informed skepticism, which Drawing the Line promotes by looking at specific maps and the people who created, believed or distrusted them. ...

Choosing a topic for Chapter One was ... [easy]. The Peters map - or the Gall-Peters map as many academic cartographers prefer to call it - had all of the ingredients of a cartographic miniseries: a simple but misguided premise, several engaging images, a dash or two of political intrigue, two (or two and a half) camps of warring factions, and as much invective as one finds when an academic controversy spills into the press, not once but several times over three decades. 

Readers familiar with the controversy readily recall the Peters world map, with a stringy, emaciated African continent at the center of a rectangular framework of meridians and parallels. Few have probably seen the earlier version

[die stereographische Projektion:]

published in 1885 by James Gall, a Scottish clergyman. Arno Peters, a German historian who "introduced" the same map projection in 1973, was apparently unaware of Gall's invention, as were most of his supporters in UNESCO, OXFAM, the World Council of Churches, and other pro-Third World, pro-human rights groups. Peters argued that his projection, by showing the areas of continents in true proportion, was the only politically correct alternative to the "Eurocentric" Mercator projection foisted for centuries on a naive public by professional mapmakers. 

Peters's point was that Mercator's map made western Europe, the United States, and other parts of the developed world look bigger and more important than less developed tropical nations in Africa, Asia [über eine etwas andere Sicht: Lord Ddf.] and Latin America - which it does. He also argued that his map, by portraying the correct relative sizes of continents, offered a new, more accurate solution that was "fair to all peoples" - which it wasn't. Not only was the Peters projection not new, but cartographic educators had repeatedly denounced the misuse of the Mercator projection as a general-purpose world map. And as Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal so effectively demonstrated in their State of the World Atlas (1981), projections called area cartograms or demographic base maps could distort countries and continents to highlight India, Indonesia, and other densely populated nations. Moreover, in focusing on area, Peters ignored distortions of shape. Ironically, tropical areas are partly morphed into string beans while prosperous mid-latitude countries very nearly resemble their shapes on a globe. By contrast, Mercator's projection, widely and appropriately used for detailed topographic maps of small areas, offers more realistic continental outlines, whereas J. Paul Goode's Homolosine Projection, a true-equal area world map presented in 1925, minimizes shape distortion with individual lobes for each continent.

Academic cartographers were incensed. Peters had ignored or misrepresented their achievements, and the news media, as ignorant as the general public of how maps work, covered the story as if he were a courageous innovator challenging a cartel of racist fuddy-duddies. Peters was right on one point, though: Mercator's world map was widely used for many situations beyond its intended purpose - navigation, for which it has no equal. And even though professional cartographers had decried this abuse, they never pursued their case as aggressively as the German historian. Were I to concoct a controversy to attack inappropriate world maps, I could not have done better than Peters.