The Peters World Atlas, New Internationalist, £19.95, ISBN 0954049950
WHEN Arno Peters published his world map in 1973, it was a revelation. We knew that all previous projections inflated the size of more northerly countries. Some made Greenland look as big as Africa, even though it is less than a tenth of its size. But Peters showed that you could turn the globe into a flat rectangular map without committing a gross act of cartographic colonialism.
It looked like a highly political act but, of course, it was really his predecessors whose maps were politically loaded. This volume, now out in a revised and updated edition, completes the job by depoliticising the atlas, too.
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My old Philips World Atlas shows most of Europe at a scale of 2 million to 1, but most of Asia and Africa at 6 or 7 million to 1 and South America—which is always the backmarker for some reason—at 14 million to 1. Not so Peters. Everywhere gets the same map scale.
This can be weird. Every tiny Arctic village gets a look-in because there are so few settlements in this huge region, while Wolverhampton, with a population of a quarter of a million, is nowhere to be seen on the crowded map of England. But it is fair. And great for aficionados of Paraguay, Somalia or Antarctica. The last has four double-page spreads.