A Small World After All

What a very strange place the world is these days. At once the planet is shrinking, thanks to technology that enables us to speak instantaneously with people in obscure villages in Tibet or Tanzania, and exploding, as political boundaries shift or even disappear entirely.

A year’s worth of changes that have brought the unification of East and West Germany, the war in the Persian Gulf and now the astonishing disunification of the Soviet Union have made it hard to keep track of what, or who, is where. The transfigurations are dizzying. The eighth edition of the large, $160 Times Atlas of the World from Times Books is just off the presses and shows 7,000 place-name changes--most of them in Germany--over the previous edition.

“Now when you think about what’s going on in the Soviet Union . . . “ a Times Books spokeswoman in New York was apparently too overwhelmed to finish her sentence. She said the next edition of the book would come out in 1994, by which time the republics that once formed the Soviet Union may have decided on some kind of structure, or at least on what they will call themselves.

For Americans, geography was never really a strong suit anyway; a 1990 Gallup poll commissioned by the National Geographic Society put Americans in the bottom one-third in an international test of geographic knowledge. Among those aged 18 to 24, Americans came in last compared to their counterparts in eight other countries.

But the global flux of recent months seems to have made Americans more aware of their geographic illiteracy. David Burch, the head of marketing at Hammond Inc. Publishing in Maplewood, N.J., said the demand for maps, globes and atlases skyrocketed when the United States became involved in hostilities in the Persian Gulf. “We couldn’t keep things in print,” Burch said. “We were going back to print every week.”

Steadily, the challenge has shifted from keeping up with the demand for geographic reference material to keeping current with what is going on in the world. “The Soviet Union gives us a complete headache,” David Rye, productions and co-editions director at Times Books of London said. “Apart from all the changes of place names, obviously you have the borders. When are they defined? At what point do you decide it’s safe to go with a particular designation?”

The dismantling of a country as vast and diverse as what once was the mighty Soviet Union is without precedent in contemporary world history, Rye said. For map makers, “it’s a bit of a nightmare.” But Bruce Marshall, editor of “The Real World,” a “new geography” (focusing on social connections, rather than political distinctions) atlas that has just been published in this country by Houghton Mifflin, said geographers had only to look at their own crystal balls to have predicted the kind of chaos that is now causing such confusion.

“I wonder why the geographers didn’t tell us 50 years ago that the Soviet Union didn’t stand a chance,” Marshall said. Topographic extremes that mean that “huge parts of the land don’t have any spring or fall, only winter or summer,” combined with a vastness that makes any kind of central management impractical should have been warning signs. Organizers of this summer’s failed coup found that out in short order, said Marshall. “Try putting together a coup in Moscow that will also take effect in Vladivostok--10 time zones away.”

Still, Marshall said, geography just doesn’t get the respect it deserves. “To this day, Harvard doesn’t have a geography department,” he said. “That’s astonishing, isn’t it?”

The rush to understand a world where Kazakhstan overnight became one of the world’s leading nuclear powers may enhance the standing of this ancient field. “I think that there is a renaissance in geographic education right now,” M. J. Jacobson, at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., said. “Because of the changing world, you have to understand the rest of the world, and where we fit in.”

Burning oil wells in Kuwait, a country many Americans would have had difficulty locating before the war in the Persian Gulf, may also spur interest in the field. “People are realizing that environmental problems don’t know political boundaries,” Jacobson said.

Bruce Marshall, of “The Real World,” agreed. “If we let the rain forests (in South America) go, it has profound effects right here.”

Cartographers, meanwhile, are racing to keep up with the new designations that come with this new world. Jacobson, at the Geographic, called this era “a challenging and exciting time for cartographers”--even though the National Geographic Society itself was forced to stop the presses on its new atlas last year when the reunification of Germany was announced. Jacobson said a new Geographic Society map of what used to be known as the Soviet Union is forthcoming, but when, “we don’t know. The answer is that we’re monitoring it very closely. The situation is still liquid.”

Rye, at Times Books in London, said, “We will catch up, will incorporate all the changes as much as we can for our next printing, next year.” Rye said one way to try to beat the system in such a politically evolving planet is to “print as few copies as we can economically get away with.” For the United Kingdom, Rye said, that means about 20,000 copies of the large Times Atlas each year.

At Times Books in New York, a spokeswoman concurred, “There’s no way in the world that we live in today that you could have an up-to-date atlas.”

Lest it be overlooked entirely in the swirl of human drama coming out of the coup in the Soviet Union, publishing had its own tale of midnight intrigue featuring frantic phone calls between Moscow and the Canadian office of Key Porter Books--and 485 burlap-wrapped parcels containing 5,000 English-language copies of “USSR: The Decisive Years.”

The 376-page coffee-table book bearing the joint imprint of the Soviet Union’s Novosti News Agency and Key Porter Books is described as the first uncensored collection of photographs from the Soviet Union to be published since the introduction of glasnost and perestroika . A statement from Key Porter Books said that the book’s 800 black-and-white and color photographs make for “a haunting portrait of a complex and formerly closed society undergoing tremendous change.”

But while the tanks were poised in Moscow and the world was wondering just what had happened to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet and Canadian co-publishers worried that a new slate of hard-line officials in the Soviet Union might not take kindly to photographs of hard-currency prostitutes, punk fashion models, AIDS victims and followers of UFOs in their country. Novosti and Key Porter Books made the decision to rush the books to print without benefit of copy-editing or last-minute corrections. Cached in their burlap wrappings, the books were mailed to Canada, only to arrive in the midst of one of that country’s frequent rotating postal strikes.

“USSR: The Decisive Years” is now making its way into bookstores across North America. It features an introduction by Alexander Yakovlev, formerly one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s top advisers.

And while we are on our it’s-a-small-small-world soapbox, Baker & Taylor, one of the country’s leading wholesalers of books to booksellers and libraries, has issued a new “multicultural catalogue” that lists more than 800 annotated fiction and nonfiction titles by and about people of African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic and Native-American cultures. The Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes and celebrates multicultural literature, assisted in the preparation of the new catalogue. It carries an introduction by National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson.

Mary Shapiro, a vice president at Baker & Taylor, said the catalogue came from “watching and listening to” what was happening in bookstores and libraries. “You realize that (multicultural awareness) is the beginning of a trend,” Shapiro said.

The new Baker & Taylor catalogue is called “Many Voices, Many Books . . . Strength Through Diversity.” In hopes of acting as a multicultural resource, the wholesaler has printed 25,000 copies for free distribution to librarians and booksellers.