Account

Company

  Menu
Large Image

Description

The true story of Gerard Mercator, the greatest map-maker of all time, who was condemned to death as a heretic.

'Geographie and Chronologie I may call the Sunne and the Moone, the right eye and the left, of all history.'

In 'The World of Gerard Mercator', Andrew Taylor chronicles both the story of a great astronomer and mathematician, who was condemned to death as a heretic, and the history of that most fascinating conjunction of science and art: the drawing of maps. Gerard Mercator was born in Flanders in 1512. In addition to creating accurate globes of the earth and the stars, he was the first person to use latitude and longitude for navigation and he created the most-used map of all time: Mercator's Projection is still the standard view of the world, the one we all envisage when we think of a map of the globe. Simply finding the best solution to the impossible challenge of reproducing the spherical world on a flat sheet of paper was a considerable achievement in itself - something geographers and map-makers had been trying to do for centuries, but Mercator also created the map of the world that would form the basis of the modern age, an image of the continents for the common man.

Until Mercator's Projection, maps offered a pictorial encyclopaedia to an illiterate world, and that world stretched far beyond the knowledge and travels of most mapmakers. It is this evolution of mapmaking from art to science that forms the backdrop to the story of Mercator, from the days of Herodotus and Strabo when fabulous creatures were supposed to inhabit the fringes of the world to the great mappae mundi of Hereford and Ebsdorf. The Greek geographer Pytheas claimed to have visited the far north of Britain to establish the limits of the habitable world; but further north, he claimed that the earth, air and sea coalesced into a jellyfish-like gelatinous suspension that made life impossible.

'The World of Gerard Mercator' is a brilliantly readable and absolutely fascinating history for the general reader, describing how our worldview came into being.

Tag This Book

This Book Has Been Tagged
It hasn't. Be the first to tag this book!

Our Recommendation

Track It. This book has been £1.99 within the past year.

Notify Me When The Price...

  • £
  • If I'm already tracking this book...

to track this book on eReaderIQ.

Track These Authors

to track Andrew Taylor on eReaderIQ.

  • to be notified each time the price drops on any book by Andrew Taylor.
  • to stop tracking Andrew Taylor.

Price Summary

  • We started tracking this book on January 21, 2014.
  • This book was £4.99 when we started tracking it.
  • The price of this book has changed 286 times in the past 3,720 days.
  • The current price of this book is £4.99 last checked one day ago.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past 90 days is £2.99.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £1.99.
  • The lowest price to date was £0.99 last reached on September 7, 2017.
  • This book has been £0.99 one time since we started tracking it.
  • The highest price to date was £7.80 last reached on February 26, 2015.
  • This book has been £7.80 one time since we started tracking it.

Genres

Additional Info

  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Lending: Disabled
  • Print Length: 306 Pages
  • File Size: 4,299 KB

We last verified the price of this book about one day ago. At that time, the price was £4.99. This price is subject to change. The price displayed on the Amazon.co.uk website at the time of purchase is the price you will pay for this book. Please confirm the price before making any purchases.