Unsung heroes are not new for Australia. We love it when sports, arts or entertainment bods battle to make it to the top globally but often when they do, they’re tall poppies and we don’t count them as ’one of us’ anymore.
That’s why I am delighted to report that Gordon Cheers of Sydney boutique publisher Millennium House, last month accepted the International Mapping Industry Association’s global best cartographic Award for Earth – A Comprehensive World Atlas. This follows on from taking out the Asia-Pacific regional best award in August.
‘Comprehensive’ is like calling Gina Rinehart’s wealth ‘comprehensive’ – this book measures1.8 metres by 2.75 metres when opened and weighs over 200kg. This puts it in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest Atlas in existence, surpassing the 360-year old record held by the Klencke Atlas housed at the British Library, which was a gift to King Charles II from Dutch merchants to mark his restoration to the British throne following Oliver Cromwell’s republic. The Klencke was shown to the public for the first time in 2010, as reported here.
Millennium House’s magnum opus, known as Earth Platinum edition, is the finale to an ‘Earth’ series that included Earth Blue, a much smaller but nevertheless oversize book which won the Galley Club Award in 2009. The Platinum tome contains 128 pages of maps and extreme high-definition photographs up to 272 Gigapixels in size, created using the multi-overlay Gigapan DSLR system, distributed here by Kayell.
Only 31 copies of Earth Platinum will be printed and leather-bound; each caries a price tag of USD$100,000. Several have already been sold, notably to the Middle East, museums and collectors. You can buy your own copy on the Fairfax bookshop site…just click ‘add to cart’ and charge the $100K to your credit card!
A copy has been acquired by the British Library, whose Head of Cartography and Topography, Peter Barber OBE, wrote the introduction to Earth Platinumand said: “The Library’s collection of maps is one of the greatest in the world, and the maps are important not only for their use as geographical aids, but also as mirrors of the cultures in which they were created. While the Klencke Atlas provides an insight into the world of British monarchs in the seventeenth century, and what they thought was important about it, the Earth Platinum will offer a reflection of what people of 2012 felt was worth recording about their very different world. It will be an astonishing resource for researchers in ten, twenty or two hundred years time.”
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PRODUCTION NOTES
There is only one sheetfed printing press made that can handle the sheet sizes of Earth Platinum and that is the KBA Planeta 205, of which only 26 are known to have been installed, with none in Australia. This meant that Millenium House had to scour the world for Planeta 205s and also for a printer willing to take the job on. Gordon Cheers found such a printer in Milan, Italy; the Litorama Group who have two KBA Planeta 205s in 5-colour plus coater configuration. Paper stock is also Italian, from the Garda Art mill. Plates were made on Kodak Creo Magnus 6383 CTP setters for a format of 1510 x 2050mm. Binding was performed by Sunflower Bindery of Hong Kong. The detail required dictated that fine-screened offset litho was the process of choice with current digital wide-format methods still not detailed enough for mission-critical cartography.
There was a New Zealand connection in the preparation and prototyping of Earth Platinum, at Wellington-based cartographic specialist Geographx who provided the 3D relief effects and oversaw around 90 international cartographers working on the project. Although printed offshore, Earth Platinum is very much an Australian-driven publishing project by Gordon Cheers and his team at Millennium House. Its aim is to be a ‘time capsule’ of early 21st Century planet Earth and a considerable objet d’art that may be reviewed in 360 years time in the same way that the Klencke Atlas has been.
There is no doubt that Earth Platinum edition is an expensive esoteric novelty, some would say a ‘folly’ in the Victorian sense, but as Robert Browning wrote: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Undeterred, Millennium House is planning more ultra-large books in the future.
RELIANCE ON ONLINE MAPS
In this day and age of GPS, Google maps and digitized Ordinance Survey maps, is there any room for printed maps? The IMIA say a definite ‘yes’ – we may think of maps as purely ‘how to get there’ tools but detailed, application-specific mapping is still alive and well and needs to be printed. Examples are topographical maps, nautical charts, geological maps, resource maps and national park guides. To drive the message of printed maps home, consider this: – with the US government fiscal shut-down, all access (except for life-saving situations), to the US Government Geological Survey’s online mapping is also shut down and there’s a rush on printed maps.
The internet is also full of stories where reliance on Google maps has led people, sometimes literally, up the garden path!
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-maps-mistakes-jersey-house-state-park/story?id=14056722
Maps were once considered amongst the most precious documents on Earth in the days of the voyages of exploration and before. Sometimes ‘Here there be dragons’ and images of savage sea-creatures were added to deter would-be adventurers. They are still politically-charged since the UN-Western view of the world’s borders and names may differ from, for example, PR China’s. Earth Platinum may be impossibly large and impractical as a portable map-book but at least it has fulfilled the vision of Australia’s Gordon Cheers and serves as a testament to the uniqueness, beauty and permanence of print.
Footnote: at the IMIA annual conference in the USA, Melbourne was announced as the venue for the 2014 regional event. No doubt we will see the giant Earth Platinum Atlas again there – unless sold out!