Product Description

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator was the greatest and most ingenious cartographer of them all: it was he who coined the word 'atlas' and solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings. It is Mercator's Projection that NASA are using today to map Mars. How did Mercator reconcile his religious beliefs with a science that would make Christian maps obsolete? How did a man whose imagination roamed continents endure imprisonment by the Inquisition? Crane brings this great man vividly to life, underlying it with colour illustrations of the maps themselves: maps that brought to a rapt public wonders as remarkable as today's cyber-world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #160885 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
Alex Hippisley Cox has got some excellent publicity lined up for this, with a big interview with Nick by Alan Franks whch ran in the WEEKEND TIMES on 14 June. Nick's two events for Stanfords, one in their shop in Manchester on 5 June and one in their Bristol shop on 12 June went extremely well. Nick has done interviews on BBC RADIO ESSEX on Friday 6th June, BBC WILTSHIRE SOUND on Monday 9th June, BBC RADIO LEEDS on 5 June, BBC RADIO OXFORD on 12 June, BBC LATE SHOW in the Midlands (across 7 BBC local radio stations) on 6 June, BBC RADIO GUERNSEY on 19 June and BBC RADIO DEVEN on 26 June. The reviews we've received so far have been excellent: "A beautifully detailed picture of the dangerous but intellectually exciting times in which his subject lived"SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "Book of the Week. Nicholas Crane's new book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet tells how Gerard Mercator, born in 1512 and son of a cobbler,became a founding father of modern geography."DAILY EXPRESS "A portrait not only of a remarkable man but also of the 16th-century world of scholarship and cartography." SUNDAY TIMES 'A colourful biography which tells the story of a cobbler's son, orphaned in his teens, who escaped the Inquisition and began

The name of Mercator is famous now only as an adjective - the Mercator Projection of the Earth as a two-dimensional map has been used for centuries, and even now NASA are using it to map Mars. But Mercator was a real person - Gerard Mercator, born and brought up in the Low Countries, whose maps and globes set a new standard of cartography for generations to come. In his highly readable and immaculately researched first chapters, Crane summons up for us the Holy Roman Empire at the time of Mercator's birth in the early 16th century. Here are struggling peasants - Mercator's father was a cobbler and smallholder - living as they had for centuries in the permanent fear of floods, droughts and marauding armies, but here too is the new learning, the Renaissance ideas that were making such an impact on the intellectual and religious life of Europe. Mercator was very much a man of the Renaissance - he even changed his name to the Latinized version of his family surname Kremer, meaning merchant. Geography and cartography were flourishing along with all the other arts and sciences, and the age of exploration had sparked a fascination with maps of far places, and with accurate methods of measuring distances closer to home. But not even maps were safe from the political and religious disputes of the time, and Mercator found himself thrown in prison for suspected heresy, and later designed maps specifically intended to foster a Catholic worldview. This is a brilliant, continually absorbing account of a great thinker, whose painstaking art never seems dry or dull in Crane's hands. Yet perhaps its greatest achievement is its portrayal of an age when both the physical and the intellectual worlds were opening up, but such were the battles for control of the truth that every work of art or science produced aligned its creator with a particular political faction - and put him in consequent danger from its opponents. (Kirkus UK)

British geographer and author Crane makes his US debut with a weighty biography of the 16th-century cobbler's son who determined how we view the world. Born Gerard Kremer of Germanic parents in a Belgian village in 1512, Mercator would have called the trade he virtually invented "cosmography" as opposed to cartography. An uncle sponsored Kremer, by his teens an orphaned pauper, to a formal education. It was the heady time when the humanist movement's classical revivalism arose in the shadow of larger-than-life figures like Luther and Erasmus to challenge the Catholic Church with Aristotelian science (among other things). Kremer had to struggle to teach himself the necessary mathematics after he decided there was more money in applied science than in philosophy, and his skill in engraving copper plates with cursive script brought him into collaboration with mapmakers. After a seven-month incarceration on suspicion of heresy (or at least associating with known heretics), the man who had latinized his name in the humanist fashion to represent himself as a merchant of books started in earnest on work that would literally change the perception of ordinary citizens, who had been bound since the Middle Ages to a largely imaginary world. Using triangulation to calculate distances brought accuracy and thus reality to maps for the first time. But it would be years before Mercator, who never went to sea and rarely ventured farther from home than the Frankfurt Book Fair, established a method for accurately projecting the surface of a solid globe onto a flat piece paper, a method NASA still uses today to plot details of planets its roving satellites survey. Above all, Crane notes, Mercator's method created maps that were "practical, accessible and could be precisely overlapped." Lucid insights into the arcane processes of cartography, together with a meticulous map of the tenor of the times show humanist genius surviving and thriving amid the death throes of feudalism. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Inside Flap
Mercator is a vivid biography of the man who created the first modern map of the world. Born into the age of discovery, Gerard Mercator lived through an extraordinary era of intellectual and scientific expansion. At the centre of this exploratory vortex were the cartographers who were painstakingly piecing together the evidence that would create a complete picture of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of them all - a poor cobbler's boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, yet survived to produce his eponymous projection and to coin the term 'atlas'. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by the quest for geographical truth, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the clash in Europe between humanism and the Church. Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The Mercator Projection revolutionised navigation and has become the most common worldview.

About the Author
Nicholas Crane is a geographer, adventurer and prize-winning writer.

Customer Reviews

An incredible book about an incredible man
This has been one of the most enjoyable biographies that I have read in a long time. Nicholas Crane gets the formula right here in a well written and wonderfully researched book.

To be able to write a book about someone like Mercator who lived so long ago is an achievement in itself. To provide a detailed account of Mercator's life and his astounding works exceeds expectations magnificently.

Mercator did not travel very far from his home, but yet was able to create globes and maps of all the known world that were wonders of their era. He gives his name to the Mercator Projection that geographers over the world know and love.

I enjoyed the non-geographical side of Mercator's life - his survival through the Inquisition inspires me to believe that the zealots who set out to "protect" religion in Mercator's time were prevented by God Himself from depriving the human race of Mercator's genius.

For geographers, this book is a must. For general historical and biographical readers, you will not be disappointed with this book.

Five stars is not enough - this is a splendid read.

A disappointingly dull tale
Fascinated by the romance of early mapping, intrigued to know more about Mercator, and encouraged by very positive reviews, I looked forward keenly to reading this biography. I have to confess to finding it very heavy going. Crane has laboured mightily in wondrously obscure sources, but for me he has failed to handle his material effectively; at times the 'scene-setting' is so pedantically and referentially detailed that my interest in the historic context was wholly exhausted, and I urgently wanted him to get on with the biography. At other points - as in his involvement with his first globe - Mercator's career seems to advance by quantum leaps without an adequate account of how and why that suddenly became possible.

But the particular failing for me is that the book seems to fall between two stools. It is hardly in the current genre of popular historic science books, which are usually racey, stimulating, and selective in their treatment: Crane's strangely disengaged manner of writing manages to dissipate almost entirely the excitement and romance in this great work of mapping the globe at a time of extraordinary opening-up of European consciousness of the world. On the other hand it lacks the analytical rigour and explication of a full-blown scientific biography.

I did read through all the way to the end, but more from a dogged sense of wanting to learn what Crane could tell me rather than from any enjoyment or sense of close engagement. I suspect that there may already be a lot of one-third-read copies of this book on shelves around the country.

stodgy, dull and incredibly hard-going
I have to confess that I'm only about a third of the way through this book but it is a struggle. Crane has managed to take what should have been an exciting story and bog it down so much that there is no sense of intellectual excitement or even the personality or mind of such an amazing man as Mercator. I am keeping going because I want to understand the achievemtnts of the man, but that is despite of the book rather than through the book - a sad indictment of the author, I'm afraid. This is a tale crying out to be well-told, but Crane sadly isn't the author to do it.