Publishing the World: Perspectives on The Times Atlas

Summary

The available opening and closing sections place the publishing history of The Times Atlas of the World within Scottish cartographic and geographical publishing traditions and discuss the challenges of digital production. Issued in London in 1895 in serial and bound formats, the first edition marked extensive areas as unknown despite rapid geographical exploration, illustrating the difficulty of incorporating new geographical and place-name information. The article stresses the editor’s role in selecting, designing and ordering maps for a defined purpose. Bartholomew was invited to produce a new edition in 1914; political boundary changes resulting from the First World War were subsequently incorporated into the 1922 Times Survey Atlas of the World, which introduced layer colouring still used today. The closing discussion compares printed and digital atlases. Screen dimensions, resolution, file size and revision cycles constrain digital display and currency, while digital products enable rapid place-name searches, multimedia, GPS positioning and access to linked information. Barclay argues that printed atlases retain advantages in geographical overview, navigability and an ordered presentation of the world, and anticipates complementary development of print and digital formats in the near future. She attributes a world atlas’s marketability to flexible, balanced and accurate representation, together with responsiveness to geographical change, user requirements and production technologies.