Mike Parker, a Rough Guide editor and Welsh-TV travel presenter, has written an enormously and endlessly fascinating book about everything of or pertaining to the British Life of Maps. It's a history, memoir, polemic, paean, psychogeography, and love poem dedicated to the Ordnance Survey map and all things cartographic. And, because Mr Parker is a dryly amusing chap with some fairly cutting observations and insights to share, it's also laugh-out-loud funny in places.
This really is the perfect book for map lovers, and the perfect read for people who didn't even know they cared about maps at all. Written very much from the same stable as books like Cod, Longitude, Salt, The Surgeon of Crowthorne etc, it takes one seemingly small subject and explodes it into something kaleidoscopically fascinating and revealing and inspiring. I couldn't put it down.
