The sixth volume in NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society)’s invitational collections of atlases of real and imagined places. From the quirky to the straightforward, from hand drawn to AI-generated images, these maps are various, beautiful, and new in every edition, beautifully produced and the atlas itself — mirabile dictu!–is reasonably priced. The maps are produced in full with insets showing off the details, and include commentary by the individual cartographers. I especially love the table of contents, which is a full page of insets from each map with its page number in the book, thirty-two maps in all.

Volume Six includes a smell map of a hospital (ew), a trail map of a canoe trip with a wrong turn in southeastern Ontario, another one of the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango (Watch Out for Cows), a fabulous panorama of the Alps, a painfully relevant map built from Le Monde‘s database that uses what is essentially a seismometer as a key to chart the shock waves of recent Russian history, an Art Nouveau map of fantasy world Arlys (an inspiration for any epic fantasy writer), and several Covid-inspired, very imaginative maps of the neighborhoods that became our individual worlds during the pandemic. If you like maps, these are for you.

Book Review Monday Chatter Atlas of Design cartography North American Cartographic Information Society