On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield: review If anyone has taken anything positive from the recent Apple Maps disaster, it's Simon Garfield. After all, what better way to thrust cartography (to which his new book is a love letter) into the forefront of public consciousness than by taking the world's most omnipresent, most relied-on map and replacing it with a piece of software so perforated with holes that ask it to find you a record shop and it'll suggest you drive off a bridge en route to your local HMV. Not that the appeal of On the Map is a fluke of context - far from it. Starting in Ancient Greece, the book delivers a chronologically organised history of maps, atlases, charts and globes, telling the often fascinating stories of key discoveries and specimens. There are medieval mappa mundi scored into calf skin and adorned with ornate cartouches, the Norse "Vinland" map that (if genuine) predates Columbus's discovery of the New World and, later on, trigonometry and the dawn of Ordnance Survey. There's also an embittered chapter on the Global Positioning System ("a loss for geography, history, navigation, maps, human communication, and the sense of being connected to the world all around us"), Sir Patrick Moore's thoughts on the mapping of Mars and a celebration of Google Maps. In other words, it's a pub quizzer's dream. That said, the constant flow of facts rarely becomes exhausting. Having written books about subjects as niche as synthetic dyes, stamps and fonts (last year's cult hit Just My Type), Garfield's understanding of the average reader's attention span is mercifully realistic, and there's rarely a train of thought that's not rounded off with a pithy anecdote or neat piece of cartographic trivia. One of the most memorable concerns the London A-Z, the first edition of which has Trafalgar Square missing from its index. When working on the map in 1936, the designer Phyllis Pearsall knocked a shoebox full of catalogue cards marked "T" out of her office window onto High Holborn, some of which were never recovered. Rather than over-romanticise the experience of map-reading, Garfield allows his varied, expertly researched stories to speak for themselves, and in so doing helps us see that there are fewer things in life more useful, rewarding and beautiful than a map that does what it's supposed to. Perhaps if Apple had read the book a few months ago, today's iPhone owners would have a much better idea of where they're going. On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield 440pp, Profile, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £16.99, ebook £15.21)