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Treasures from the Map Room: A Journey through the Bodleian Collections

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The Bodleian Library is home to one of the world’s largest and oldest collections of maps, with atlases, maps, and books on cartography dating back to the fourteenth century, including many that are among the most rare and historically significant.

Treasures from the Map Room publishes seventy-five extraordinary examples from this collection, housed in the Map Room at the newly renovated Weston Library. The maps reproduced in Treasures range from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Among them are the fourteenth-century Gough Map, the earliest road map of Great Britain that achieved a remarkable level of accuracy and detail for its time; fifteenth-century portolan charts intended for maritime navigation; the Selden Map of China, the earliest Chinese map to show shipping routes; and an important early map from the medieval Islamic Book of Curiosities . The book also includes a great many recent examples, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth and C. S. Lewis’s map of Narnia. Debbie Hall takes readers back in time to uncover the fascinating story of each treasure, from a map plotting outbreaks of cholera to a jigsaw map of India from the 1850s and silk escape maps carried by pilots flying missions over occupied Europe during World War II.

With lavish full-color photography and descriptions of each map’s provenance, purpose, and creation, Treasures from the Map Room is a beautiful and informative catalog of this remarkable collection.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2016

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Debbie Hall

12 books

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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Profile Image for Ron Me.
295 reviews3 followers
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December 24, 2019
This is an OK coffee-table book. I only looked at the pictures (only some of which were interesting to me), and didn't read it. I wish there were more older maps (medieval and ancient), but I was thrilled to see for the first time an (unfortunately partial) reproduction of the Peutinger Table. The book had an original map of Middle Earth, which was nice, though I've seen it elsewhere. Eh.
Profile Image for Donald.
124 reviews2 followers
July 2, 2017
Fascinating, beautiful and informative but I wish they had adopted other books' system of including both the full map and a 1:1 extract. Frequently I couldn't tell if I was looking at the full map, or if I was what exactly I was looking at because it was zoomed out so far.
Profile Image for Richard Archambault.
447 reviews18 followers
February 28, 2017
Beautiful maps in a beautiful book. There's a definite UK / Oxford slant to many of the maps, since it's from the University of Oxford collection. The only reason this is a 4 instead of a 5 is that I wish that they had included either more close-ups of some of the maps, or shown the entirety of others.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews

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