SEASON’S READINGS : The Cartographer’s Christmas

Atlas supports the world. I picture him in a precise way: Down on one knee, his huge back bent under the weight of the globe he holds tantalizingly aloft, both arms raised to steady that most prized possession--an oversized apple, ripe for biting.

But Atlas shoulders more than a globe, more than the world. He holds imagination and desire. He gives his name to the lost continent of Atlantis. Homer singles him out as “the man who knows the depths of the whole sea, and keeps the tall pillars which hold the heavens and earth asunder.”

Atlas so thoroughly dominated geography that Gerhardus Mercator, the Flemish mathematician and cartographer, seized on the ancient god as a frontispiece for his collection of maps, the “Atlas, Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi” (1585). Open these pages, his title implies, and find God’s bounty, a graphic rendering of what the Bible can only hint at through description. Through his pages, readers can take the ultimate voyage and find truth.

To free geography from the constraints of Ptolemy, Mercator reshapes space, projecting a truer, more accurate sphere in his Atlas. His method of placing parallels and meridians at right angles can be likened to the introduction, by Tuscan artists in the 13th Century, of vanishing-point perspective in their paintings. The world opens and opens, initially on flat surfaces--on canvases and walls and maps--begging to be traced out in the real, outside world. But Mercator knows that before readers set out to explore, they first internalize the map.

Maps, like texts, rely on literacy. The credit for designing the first map usually goes to Anaximander (611-546 BC), at about the same time that the alphabet arrives in Greece. Alphabetic literacy creates and fosters the kind of abstract, spatial thinking that map-making requires. As soon as reading situated itself firmly in the Middle Ages, philosophers began describing it as cartography--a map for exploring the soul. So Hugh of St. Victor, in his guide to the art of reading, titled the “Didascalicon” (1128), advises readers to leave “the sweetness of their native soil,” and exile themselves in favor of true adventure--the noblest pilgrimage--of self-discovery. Every book for Hugh acts like an atlas, calling the reader from mundane existence, across mental space, into intimate association with God. Columns of words turn into the very pillars of heaven itself. Both book and map chart the unpredictable: Terra incognita beckons from beyond the horizon and beneath the skin.

One of the most fascinating accounts of that terra appears in a late 13th-Century imago mundi , which tells of two Mesopotamian monks who set out to find “the place where heaven and earth join”--the terrestrial paradise, a spot plainly marked on numerous medieval world maps. In their route the monks encounter scores of strange beings, lose themselves in the wildest woods, and meet all sorts of historical and mythological figures. While they travel through space and time, their real journey takes them to the darkest recesses of the imagination and the soul. In the face of such undertakings, destinations pale. Indeed, after years and years of travel, the monks come within 20 miles of their goal. But they stop, turned aside by Saint Macarius, who visits them in a dream and persuades them to tell their story to the uninitiated back home.

By the 19th Century, however, the atlas had to free itself of topography altogether. Maps had become too literal. Navigators could too easily check their accuracy. The definition of atlas broadens to include volumes containing bar graphs, charts, illustrative plates, engravings, tables and so on--a tool for analyzing and understanding the precision of the world.

Perhaps because of Oprah and Geraldo and Sally Jessie Raphael, the atlas has returned as a kind of confessional. It snoops at the most remote reaches of daily life, mapping the most personal in politics and passions, from geographic concentrations of widows and widowers, to areas of highest fertility, to who reads Vanity Fair, and who uses dental floss. Want to know what kind of person prefers white bread over croissants, Obsession over Old Spice? Michael Weiss’ Latitudes and Attitudes: An Atlas of American Tastes, Trends and Passions tells all.

Publishers produce these books folio-sized, on thick, coated stock, between the most substantial covers: To lift one is to atlas the world. They design them as fun for the easy chair, not as guides for the highway or seaway. So, for example, Nigel Pickford, the author of The Atlas of Shipwrecks and Treasure, does not really expect his readers to retrieve the sunken Ulbo Island or the Flor De La Mar, except from the depths of the imagination. The Atlas of Sacred Places suggests a medieval, visionary origin through its subtitle: “Meeting Points of Heaven and Earth.” Dazzling photographs offer proof that such points exist. In The Atlas of Contemporary America, the country and its inhabitants have dissolved into an overwhelming array of statistical norms and numbers. I had difficulty discovering any there there.

Classical mythology depicts Atlas as the mightiest of gods. In architecture, Atlantes, sculpted male figures, support classical structures. In like fashion, the atlas provides its users great power and strength through supporting information. From Atlas to Mercator, men dominate the genre. One can only wonder what kind of work might have been represented historically--indeed, what kind of world we might now encounter--if Diana or Venus or Athena had been asked to hold our globe delicately and firmly aloft.*

LATITUDES AND ATTITUDES by Michael J. Weiss

(Little Brown: $29.95; 224 pp.)

THE ATLAS OF SHIPWRECKS AND TREASURES by Nigel Pickford

(Dorling Kindersley: $29.95; 200 pp.)

THE ATLAS OF SACRED PLACES by James Harpur

(Henry Holt: $45; 240 pp.)

ENCYCLOPEDIC WORLD ATLAS

(Oxford University Press: $35; 272 pp.)