The book Earth Platinum is a unique cartographic Atlas – and large. The book defies the imagination with images the size of walls. The project involved many challenges and new approaches from tools to editing to production. V1 Magazine editor Jeff Thurston discussed the project with Gordon Cheers, Managing Director at Millennium House, the publisher of the Atlas.
V1 Magazine: What is Earth Platinum?
GC: Earth Platinum is the world’s largest atlas, and contains maps, text and photos. The maps are the largest scale of any world atlas on a single page, (attached is 2 page plan for reference) many of the images are so large they take up a wall of 6 feet x 9 feet. Millennium House has spent over US $1 million in producing the mapping required for Earth. It will be published in August 2011. It will cost US $100,000 per copy.
V1 Magazine: How large is it, who was involved and how long did it take to complete?
GC: There are 128 pages in Earth Platinum, and the weight of the book is 150 kilograms, with over 30 large photographs, 61 pages of maps. I had the idea over 25 years ago.
We have been working on the mapping involved in Earth Platinum for over 4 years. If you added up all the hours of work, it would take one person over 60 years to complete. Fortunately for us we have had over 70 people working on the book.
V1 Magazine: Where did the information come from and were others supporting the work?
GC: Our publisher Janet Parker has been living this project for over 3 years, without her help it would not have been possible. The amount of data we have is so large that we needed to produce a book of this size to do the material justice. Some islands are now seen for the first time at a reasonable size in relation to their nearest continent. It’s not always easy to get a sense of scale of our planet, this is the closest a book can go to achieve this.
This is the closest any of us who are not astronauts can get to obtain a feeling of how the whole world would look from space. It is important that we have a record of our time (2011), and if this record can inspire individuals to travel and marvel of at our world then we have achieved what we wanted. For Museums and Libraries we believe Earth Platinum would provide the “anchor of an exhibition” of the worlds best mapping and the mapping that relates to a particular country. We also believe that Earth Platinum is a work of art. This magnificent book combines maps, images and information in a stunning presentation.
V1 Magazine: What inspired this work?
GC: Over 25 years ago, when working for a publisher, I published a large guide to Australia full of maps. I mentioned to my boss that it would be great to produce the same sort of book on the whole world. My boss at the time said it would be too expensive—as did the next 3 bosses I had in publishing. So 6 years ago I set up my own company to produce Earth Blue and Earth Gold and from there went on to produceEarth Platinum.
V1 Magazine: What has been the response to this large cartographic effort?
GC: The many people who came to see the prototype on display at Frankfurt Book fair, were so amazed and impressed by Earth Platinum. They wanted to look at every page, and search for their home town before having photographs taken with the book to show to family and friends. Their enthusiasm for the project made me realize just how popular maps remain, regardless of any advances in electronic availability.
V1 Magazine: Wy did you do this?
GC: We believe Earth Platinum will be the biggest book published (i.e. it has a cover, pages, an index, there is more than one printed, and is readily available for sale). Anyway, it is certainly the largest atlas ever printed or published. The amount of data we have is so large that we needed to produce a book of this size to do the material justice. Some islands are now seen for the first time at a reasonable size in relation to their nearest continent. It’s not always easy to get a sense of scale of our planet, this is the closest a book can go to achieve this.
V1 Magazine: Do you think it will be the last big atlas produced?
GC: Many people are using GPS devices instead of road atlases to move around, many travelers download the map of the area they want, before they travel. All this means that less maps and atlases are being printed, fewer cartographers are being trained, most mainstream publishers have sold off their cartography departments. Two years ago we published our “smaller” atlas, Earth Blue (24 inches x 18 inches), it won all the cartographic awards—no publisher has since tried to match its size or detail.
The last big atlas close to Earth Platinum was produced over 350 years ago in black and white—it’s now priceless. The world was viewed a lot differently then. It may take another 350 years before anyone challenges our atlas. However, my feeling is it will never happen. Earth Platinum will become a priceless piece of art work/historical document representing our world today.
V1 Magazine: Who do you think will buy this?
GC: Our book is available to private, corporate and institutional purchasers. Our hope is that institutions (major libraries, museums, galleries) will acquire Earth Platinum and use it as “an anchor” to a major mapping exhibition in that country. When you look at Earth Platinum you feel like you’re on top of the world. So unless you’re an astronaut looking from space this is the closest any of us will get to seeing the world as whole. The images we’re using are so detailed, each image is made up of up to 1,000 photos. People who have stood near the double page image of Machu Picchu and have traveled there, have said to me, it’s like being back there again — “you can almost feel and touch the mountain”. Not bad for an image 6 feet x 9 feet long. Earth Platinum will have many images like Machu Picchu.
V1 Magazine: Will students find this work useful?
GC: Earth Platinum will be an astonishing publication that we hope will inspire travelers and students. By using detailed hill shading and colored relief, the world and its terrain makes more sense. An example is the thought of crossing the Himalayas—which looks daunting when you see the height of the mountains and the extent of ranges. This was less obvious on previous maps and atlases, as was the way many national borders follow rivers or mountain ranges.
V1 Magazine: A project of this scope must have required special talents and resources, can you explain what challenges you had?
GC: The first problem was the time it took to convince some people that we can make this happen, it was equally difficult to convince some of our cartographers that this project was possible. We finally convinced them that we can make maps this large, we can find a way to make computers cope, we can find a printer, and the maps can be checked, and the information is available out there. It was always going to be a challenge, but we always believed it could be done.
The computer power required to execute such a enormous task is huge. All our cartographers had to add more computer memory to cope with the number of calculations. Most of our cartographers needed all new, latest high-spec hardware to work on even a single page map file for Earth Platinum. The skills our cartographers are acquiring are immense.
V1 Magazine: Were the challenges in printing and editing?
GC: Once the maps were prepared, we then had to find a local printer with the ability to print out working copies at full size, so that our editors could work on these pages. We are all too familiar with sending a document to our office printer and arriving at the machine to find that our document is waiting for us, whereas our printer had to use a special press to print out digital maps ready for the map editors and each map took more than a day to process and print out.
The editorial process then faced challenges of its own. Working on the giant-sized pages was a very different proposition to reading through pages of manuscript. Verifying, checking and rechecking every entry was made all the more difficult when working across a span of some 4.5 feet and a length of 6 ft (taller than most of our editors!). Each and every correction had to be transferred to an electronic file and then sent to the cartographic team, who are based all around the world. Checking and rechecking each of the revisions was every bit as difficult as the initial check. This is a very labor-intensive part of the project, one that cannot be replaced by a software application and the ‘press of a button’.
Printing and binding was yet another obstacle to overcome. Locating a printer with the machinery and expertise to print such a volume proved difficult, but we were finally able to locate a printer in Europe who had not only the machinery but the skill, craftsmanship, and attention to detail that we demanded. There is perhaps only one such printer in the world who is capable of producing Earth Platinum to the standard and quality we expect.
All the skills required for every aspect of Earth Platinum are part of the publishing tradition, which with the advent and rise in popularity of e-books, is slowly becoming a dying art.
V1 Magazine: The earth obviously changes quickly with new governments, policies, landscape changes and so on. How were these impacts realised?
GC: Just the sheer detail of Earth Platinum has the function of standardizing the spelling of place names (especially for those countries where there is not a Geographical Names Board or equivalent body). Having produced our smaller atlas, Earth Blue (24 inches x 18 inches), and having built an extensive database as a result, it has brought our attention to the problems that exist in every prominent atlas available, particularly for place names in countries using a non-Roman alphabet.
Where there are alternate spellings for the same place, we believe Earth Platinum and our other publications will create such a critical mass of atlas material, that ultimately our spelling will become the one that is deferred to. Just as the Oxford Dictionary is the definitive word on the English language, for many places Earth Platinum will provide the point in time where one particular spelling becomes the standard.
V1 Magazine: Were new approaches for cartographic representation used?
GC: Up until recently many maps just used contour lines to indicate height. Using up-to-date data we have produced relief shading that is more informative and attractive for today’s user. The sheer task of “tiling” the world together in one seamless stream, where there is consistency across all the oceans and continents is no mean feat technically and intellectually. From the tallest mountains in Asia to the deepest ocean trench in the Pacific Ocean, we have graded the world. What the future holds for how topographic layers will be displayed in atlases only time will tell, maybe 3D will be the new look. But as of today Earth Platinumis an example of the how we see things, on paper at least.
V1 Magazine: Finally, what is cartography—art, science or politics?
GC: Cartography is an art. We had teams of people just dedicated to creating the color background—differentiating the colors by the height above sea level. We spent hours at meetings discussing the choice of colors—even the oceans have 7 shades of blue. Once the coloring was decided we added the place names, only to find in some places the names were not legible as the brown background first chosen for the mountains was too dark and the type was too fine. Back to the drawing board, to get the balance right.
Cartography is a science. The symbols, layers, and the linework come together in a program called Adobe Illustrator. Once the population of a town (from over 5 million down to less than 10,000) is known, the label and marker size are then assigned based on our predetermined size scale, the town name is given a reference point (longitude and latitude), and the towns are automatically added to the maps using programs such as Maplex and MAPublisher. Cartographers then have to check by sight to make sure the names don’t run into or on top of other names. This is tricky with long names such as Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauot
Cartography is political, as over 40 editors (from all around the world) had the task of researching how to treat sensitive political issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, Jammu and Kashmir, and many more. Fortunately for Earth Platinum, and its readers, Earth Platinum is published in Australia. As it now exists, we would not be allowed to print Earth Platinum in China. If we printed in China, where some atlases are printed, the South China Sea, India/Pakistan, and Israel would all look very different.
Earth Platinum reflects a modern-day view of the world as it is now—taking in the partition of Sudan, the relatively new country of Kosovo, applying a current standardization to the towns in China, recognizing the South African, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand trend to revert to traditional names for some of their major towns and features. As it now exists, Earth Platinum cannot be sold in Korea or India. We could have made changes to make Korean and Indian sales possible, but chose not to. We defer to the UN for clarification and boundaries, spelling, etc—I thought if it’s good enough for the UN, it was good enough for us! Of course some of the updates simply reflect our world as it is today and who is in power, such as in Antigua and Barbuda’s highest point, which has been renamed, to honor the President of the United States, Barack Obama. Boggy Peak, on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, is now officially known as Mount Obama.
Is it a political statement, a publication reflecting modern history and cartography, or a work of art? Only 500 years from now, with the test of time, will someone else decide.
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Gordon Cheers – Managing Director, Millennium House, North Narrabeen NSW, Australia
More Information: http://www.millenniumhouse.
