Gerard Mercator’s 16th century breakthrough in mapmaking was a tragedy for the Western imagination. Of course it led to better ocean navigation and fewer sailors’ widows. But his creation of an ...

Maps today strike us as fairly innocuous charts of the world. But 500 years ago, an era when political power and religious authority were in flux, maps were fraught with implications that made owning ...

See history in a new light this Classic Week at Christie’s London, with four live auctions and three online sales celebrating the breadth of human creativity from antiquities to modern classics.

For those who only know the name Mercator through the controversial map projection that bears his name, historian Andrew Taylor has done a great service. In “The World of Gerard Mercator,” Taylor has ...

The world of Gerard Mercator, Andrew Taylor, Harper Perennial, #8.99 AS THE great explorers brought back news of newly discovered AS THE great explorers brought back news of newly discovered lands, ...

Forty years ago, a German historian named Arno Peters published a world map that he described as a rebuttal to four centuries of faulty cartographic thinking. Peters believed that too much modern ...

In the course of a life that nearly spanned the 16th century, that glorious age of exploration, a Flemish peasant's son, Gerard Mercator, helped shape the modern perception of the planet while seldom ...

Geradus Mercator was the first person to use the word atlas to describe a book of maps. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Google has marked the birthday of 16th century cartographer Gerard Mercator, who ...

It’s the map of the world we all recognise today, but until Gerard Mercator came up with his elegant solution in 1569, the question of how to turn the earth’s three dimensional sphere into a flat ...

Fans of The West Wing may recall the Cartographers for Social Equality suggesting the Mercator projection of the world be replaced with the Gall-Peters projection, which corrects cylindrical ...