‘Map: Exploring the World’ Phaidon, £39.95
Explore the globe, take a trip to outer space, time-travel through history, and then find your way back to your coffee table with this collection of more than 300 maps. Arranged in thought-provoking pairs, ‘Map’ compares the different ways that cartographers have tried to make sense of the world around us. From an ancient Chinese astrology chart to the moon-map used to land Apollo 11, this celebration of cartography is about much more than getting from A to B. Some more esoteric examples include a representation of London’s cholera epidemic to an early infographic of Mount Vesuvius’s lava flow. You’ll never look at Google Maps in the same way again. Phoebe Trimingham