 | Cartographies Of Time: A History Of The Timeline By Anthony Grafton, Daniel Rosenberg
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Product Description
What does history look like? How do you draw time?
From the most ancient images to the contemporary, the line has served as the central figure in the representation of time. The linear metaphor is ubiquitous in everyday visual representations of time—in almanacs, calendars, charts, and graphs of all sorts. Even our everyday speech is filled with talk of time having a "before" and an "after" or being "long" and "short." The timeline is such a familiar part of our mental furniture that it is sometimes hard to remember that we invented it in the first place. And yet, in its modern form, the timeline is not even 250 years old. The story of what came before has never been fully told, until now.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by theirgeographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #5707 in Books
- Published on: 2010-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
"You may not be able to save time in a bottle, but surely it can be laid on the line. Beginning with fourth-century Christian theologian Eusebius's Chronicle, the timeline has been a mainstay for historians eager to visualize the temporal. In Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton's scholarly yet spirited account, we can see the church father's `image of history' recast with increasing intricacy and decorative flourishes. If some intriguing examples require viewers to decipher minuscule type and thread through labyrinthine structures, the best are often the clearest - those comprehended almost instantly. The timeline, the authors note, comes naturally to us - we think of time as inherently spatial, as long or short, with a start and a finish. Every day, every millennium, can be paced out from one side of the page to the other, or wound in a circle, as a few of these were, in fact, originally wheel charts with moving parts. Joseph Priestly constructed `A New Chart of History' (1769) with the intention of enlivening the march of the ages for viewers, showing them at a glance `all empires subsisting in the world' so they might `observe which were then rising, which were flourishing, and which were upon the decline.' While this isn't quite history written with lightening, these charts deliver whole epochs to the eye with a swiftness that belies the myriad days they condense." --Book Forum
"The first book, Cartographies of Time, is a heavily illustrated and comprehensive history of time maps, from tables and charts to cartographic illustration to the linear form we now associate with the word `timeline.' In chapter one, the authors write, `Our claim is that the line is a much more complex and colorful figure than is usually thought.' The fact that Anthony Grafton, Princeton professor and author of The Footnote (1999), is the co-author of this volume comes as no surprise. His ability to instill passion in his readers for an odd little thing like a footnote or a timeline is astonishing (much like Henry Petroski's books about bookshelves and pencils.)" --Fine Books Magazine
"It's definitely feeling like spring around here! We got a big box of gorgeous ceramics from Pigeon Toe (see tripod pot above) as well as our new favorite book, Cartographies of Time, plus more awesome little gifts for babies and kids. More soon as always!" --Rare Device
"Two brand new books I'm excited to pick up are Amsterdam Made By Hand, and Cartographies of Time. Both are aesthetically beautiful and detailed in the artistry of their respective subjects." --Lox Papers, March 3, 2010
"Rosenberg and Graftons text is crisp and informative, but the true stars of Cartographies of Time are the numerous illustrations and photographs of the chronologies themselves... Lovers of history, art, and design will find much to enjoy in this volume. RATING: 7 out of 10." --Pop Matters, April 9, 2010
"This is the best book I've seen in years and if the nice people at Princeton Architectural Press had not sent me a review copy, I would happily have paid them double the very reasonable list price of $50 for the book. This is a keeper." --BibliOdyssey, Friday, April 30, 2010
"I've been absolutely enthralled by its contents ever since I pulled it from the padded envelope. Cartographies of Time, by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, literally impresses you with its point from the moment you take it in-hand. Subtitled "A History of the Timeline," the book itself is corrugated with horizontally embossed lines on its covers. The effect is delightful (signaling right up front that this book is something special) and things just keep getting better as you travel deeper into the text. "Cartographies of Time is absolutely gorgeous....This is the type of artful and enlightening tome that makes me thrilled to be a book nerd. It's the sort of title that I'll have fun turning other book, history, design, and art enthusiasts onto." --Make Magazine, May 6, 2010
"Its only April, and my vote for the most beautiful book of the year may be all sewn up. Cartographies of Time, published recently by Princeton Architectural Press, is an eye-popping record of the ways that mapmakers, chronologists, artists and other infographics geeks have tried to convey the passage of time visually." -- Jennifer Schuessler --New York Times Book Blog, April 16, 2010
"Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Graftons book Cartographies of Time is out now: my pre-ordered copy from Amazon is in front of me as I write. It looks beautiful and is lavishly illustrated." -- StephenBD --Chronographics, April 15, 2010
"Extraordinary stuff." --Ace Jet 170, May 14, 2010
"...the book's fascinating swathe of cartographic imagery will appeal to history buffs and data visualization fans alike." -- Maggie York-Worth --Cool Hunting, April 6, 2010
"The NY Times' Paper Cuts blog calls Cartographies of Time the most beautiful book of the year. I cannot disagree. In attempting to answer the question how do you draw time?, the authors present page after page of beautiful and clever visual timelines." -- Jason Kottke --Kottke.org, April 16, 2010
"I don't often give in to impulse buys, but I just ordered Cartographies of Time, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be well worth the thirty bucks." -- Nathan Yau --Flowing Data, April 19, 2010)
"Entertaining...visually arresting." -- Peter Terzian --The Barnes & Noble Review, May 19, 2010
"Great works of non-fiction often stand out because they make detailed examinations of even the most obscure topics fascinating. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline certainly follows this pattern and will appeal to anyone with a love of history or design." -- Ben Bowers --GearPatrol.com, April 7, 2010
"A must read." --McCulley Design Lab, April 6, 2010
About the Author
Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University. He is the author of numerous books on European history and also writes on a wide variety of topics for the New Republic, American Scholar, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker.
Daniel Rosenberg is associate professor of history at the University of Oregon. He has published widely on history, theory, and art, and his work appears frequently in Cabinet magazine, where he is editor-at-large. With Susan Harding, he is editor of Histories of the Future.
Most helpful customer reviews
32 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Warning: most illustrations are not in focus
By J. Coates
It is with much regret that I must report that an otherwise excellent book has a major production flaw.
As far as I can tell, it appears that the author's provided scanned images of many ancient documents to the designer at MIT. The layout and type is all excellent. But, it looks like the majority of images were not properly sharpened in Photoshop (a standard procedure when using scanned images) before being imported into InDesign (or possibly QuarkXPress) for the production of the book. There are a few images that are sharp. They appear to be taken with a digital camera or are more modern timelines converted directly from EPS vector files for the layout. In one example you can see the original scan, fuzzy, and next to it a sharpened close up of a part of the very same image.
If it is not a problem with the designer doing sharpening of images, than it is some kind of problem with the printer overseas either using the wrong image data or un-sharpening the images in some way.
It does not appear to be a screen alignment issue or something physically done wrong in printing. (Although, on a few signatures, the text is foggy but I think that is the ink thinning out - a consequence, perhaps, of MIT saving money by going to overseas for printing.)
Why do sharp illustrations matter in this book? Because it is all about very detailed graphs. It is nearly useless because one cannot make out any of the details in the images printed in the book.
Really a shame that this disaster happened. The designer and the editor should have caught this in the proofs and corrected it before publication. If it was entirely the printer's fault (it is could be) then MIT has a good cause to go back to the printer and find out what happened and hopefully, the printer will redo it if it was the output or printer's mistake.
The book would only be worth buying if very deeply discounted. If recalled and reprinted properly, I would give it 5 stars. It is otherwise a fascinating book.
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
A History of Histories Flowing on the Page
By R. Hardy
"While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored." So starts an impressive illustrated book _Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline_ (Princeton Architectural Press) by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton. The reason the timeline is ignored is that it seems so obvious - plot historic trends on a line, the earlier ones on one end leading to later ones on the other. It is such a simple idea that it is a surprise that we didn't know about it as soon as we started putting marks on paper. Yet there is a history of the development of such lines, and it is fascinating how the lines caught on once people started charting history on paper. That such graphic histories are useful seems obvious; they have the potential for giving visual form to historical flow, and for showing connections of one trend to another. There are plenty of serious charts of time shown here that conscientiously do just that. There are other charts, just as serious, that have been designed to show, for instance, how Jesus is going to return in 1843, and there are idiosyncratic charts by Dadaists which show not much of anything but in a highly complex fashion. The book is most entertaining when it looks at these oddities, but there is nothing like it to show our progress at taking graphic time seriously.
The antecedent of the timeline was probably the lists and tables giving a chronology of rulers and important events. Family trees lent themselves to chronological display, although many of the ones here are so complicated that it is hard to see the years ticking by. By far the most important name here is Joseph Priestley, whose experiments in chemistry helped in understanding what oxygen did and whose religious beliefs forced him to flee to America to avoid persecution. He was the inventor of the time map as we know it. One of his charts produced here is _A Chart of Biography_ (1765) showing a horizontal line for each scientist on the chart (the chart shown concerns those involved in investigating vision, light, and color, but there was a more extensive chart that showed artists, statesmen, historians, and more). Each line starts on the birth year and ends on the death year of each scientist. Elegant and effective, it was a watershed: "Though it followed centuries of experimentation, it was the first chart to present a complete and fully theorized visual vocabulary for a time map, and the first to successfully compete with the matrix as a normative structure for representing regular chronology." Many of the charts here are direct descendants of Priestley's, and many of them are designed to push a particular religious view. The millennial views of an imminent apocalypse in the nineteenth century combined with cheap printing rates produced many strange charts, some starting with the seven days of creation and ending, as they say, "in the not so distant future." Among the charts shown here is a representation of history up to 1843; that was the date when the followers of the New England minister William Miller predicted the Apocalypse, and history was to end then, so the chart did, too. His followers were disappointed that the end did not come in 1843, and when it did not come even in 1844 it was clear that there was some error, and, the authors say tactfully, "both Miller's predictions and his chronology charts had to be radically revised." There were other charts afterwards to show a later year for the end; at least some learned the lesson that no such end is predictable, and those who thought it still predictable were not so bold as to put a date on it.
This book is filled with gorgeous color pictures of the charts. It must be said that some of the pictures are just too small, but this seems unavoidable when some of these charts were huge, more than fifty feet long. Many are crammed with words, too, and so we should probably thank the authors for reading them for us and then reproducing them in a way that offers no temptation for us to scan them from beginning to end. The ones that can be read are fascinating, like the Marconi Telegraph chart that shows the time and position of transatlantic steamers for April 1912, by which it could be seen which ones ought to have been near enough the _Titanic_ to help her out. Buckminster Fuller produced a chart in 1943 to show how the world was about to have a technological revolution that would end war and poverty. Closer to accurate is the simple graph by Gordon Moore, the famous "Moore's Law" which shows the inexorable increase of speed of computing as time goes by, and has proved to be surprisingly accurate. Mark Twain had a chart that was part of his history game, and there were other games that were graphic ways to help remember important historic dates and events. There are not only timelines but time circles, and in one case a time dragon from 1672. There are brilliant time maps and silly ones, ones based on facts and some based only on artistic interpretation. Collected in this handsome volume, they make a rich show of graphics and of our attempts to make sense of history.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.Cartographies of Time - By Anthony Grafton and Daniel Rosenberg
By M.J.Blackam
"Cartographies of Time" is an in-depth review of the use of timelines in history. The subject matter is well researched and examined with thoroughness. This is a nice book to hold and handle, and should be pleasing to those with an interest in maps, timelines, and the historical techniques of presenting chronologies and events. I think it would also be of use to people with a graphic persuasion who are looking at novel ways of presenting historical summaries or timelines on poster presentations - not because it is an instructional (far from it) but because it presents a wealth of timeline examples from history that I found inspiring. The book is not without fault, and two things deserve comment: firstly, the format of the book is not large enough to do full justice to the beautiful graphics (I spent plenty of time with a magnifying glass!); and secondly the page layout leads to text that is a few points too small for my liking, and lots of large space without print. These are fairly minor points though, and the content and scope of the book outweighs them. I mention them in the hope that a later edition in a larger format would do better justice to the impressive content. In summary, this is a really nice book that is pleasant to flip through or to read. An improved format would easily get 5 out of 5, but this time it's a 4 to 4 and a half.
M.J.Blackam, Melbourne, Australia.
http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/1568987633
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