"The father of critical cartography, and therefore the idea that a map should be understood as more than just a set of directions, was J. B. Harley . . .The New Nature of Maps . . . display[s] great erudition."

--Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker

"Harley was an iconoclast, subverting traditional approaches to map-making by drawing together art history, literature, philosophy and visual culture. It's a view that can now be savored in his collected essays, The New Nature of Maps."

--Nick Saunders, New Scientist

"With supreme tact, sympathetic insight into Harley's personality and his own deft scholarship, Laxton has produced..a book worthy of Harley."

--Catherine Delano-Smith, Nature

"Inlcuding Andrew's introduction . . . we have a debate within the volume, not only postmodernism and its critique, but also other examples of Harley's anit-positivist and anti-Eurocentric approach alongside a potent understanding of the processes and problems of map making."

--Jeremy Black, Imago Mundi

Johns Hopkins Web Site, December, 2004

In this collection of essays J. B. Harley (1932-1991) draws on ideas in art history, literature, philosophy, and the study of visual culture to subvert the traditional, "positivist" model of cartography, replacing it with one that is grounded in an iconological and semiotic theory of the nature of maps. He defines a map as a "social construction" and argues that maps are not simple representations of reality but exert profound influences upon the way space is conceptualized and organized. A central theme is the way in which power--whether military, political, religious, or economic--becomes inscribed on the land through cartography. In this new reading of maps and map making, Harley undertakes a surprising journey into the nature of the social and political unconscious.