Children's World Atlas

Here’s a colourful magnum which reckons to take us on ‘a journey of discovery, illuminating the societies, cultures, histories and landscapes of every corner of the globe’. Never having seen a globe with corners (I once had a Rubik globe but even that was spherical), I expected something startlingly unique. Relief set in on opening a relatively conventional atlas, with continent mapping surrounded by an incontinent flood of social, cultural, historical and landscape capsules – just the sort of thing at which the publishers are dead slick.

The maps are great – not too physical, they prioritise national and state boundaries and towns and cities. So you can look at a map of the Southern States and find all the places immortalised in American song. You can even follow Route 66 as it winds from Chicago to LA and spot all the towns on the way (but despite the lyric’s instructions you will have to ‘forget Winona’ – it’s not marked).

The capsules round the maps fit where they touch and can act as stimuli towards further research. It’s here you find the odd goof; while discussing population erosion in the Amazon rainforest one capsule tells us that ‘The Kaxinawa Indians (left) still cultivate root vegetables as a food crop.’ Now, first, what does ‘left’ mean? Did they leave, or are there still some left, and then, if growing root crops is a sign of primitivity, how does the 14-strong editorial team react to the news that our beetroots have done really well this summer?

This atlas works very well ‘forwards’ – you can study a map and find out a lot about the place and its people. ‘Backwards’, it’s less good, and looking up places can be difficult. There’s an ‘index’ with very few places in it but plenty of terms like ‘cycling’ and ‘kite flying’ locating the relevant capsules. Then there’s a ‘gazetteer’ which directs us to places marked on the map. Or does it? If you’re looking for the birthplace of famous Belgian Adolphe Saxe you won’t find Dinant in the gazetteer, but it’s on the map all right; same with Hawick, birthplace of Hi-note Henry. And I was curious to see how the compilers would fit P’’yattykhatky (it’s in Romania, since you ask) into a conventional alphabetic array, but they chickened out on that one, too.

All the above (and maybe more) apart, this atlas does provide, if not a journey of discovery, a most enjoyable ramble which may induce the highly reward benign form of cartophilia in some of its readers. It’d make a superb bedside browser – one country a night should produce dreams of places you never knew existed.