Mercator: The Man who Mapped the Planet

by Nicholas Crane

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Book cover for Mercator

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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.
  • ISBN10 075381692X
  • ISBN13 9780753816929
  • Publish Date 5 June 2003 (first published 27 June 2002)
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 12 November 2014
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Orion Publishing Co
  • Imprint Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
  • Format Paperback
  • Pages 416
  • Language English