Mercator: The Man who Mapped the Planet - Softcover

Alex Hippisley Cox has got some excellent publicity lined up for this, with a big interview with Nick by Alan Franks whch ran in the WEEKEND TIMES on 14 June. Nick's two events for Stanfords, one in their shop in Manchester on 5 June and one in their Bristol shop on 12 June went extremely well. Nick has done interviews on BBC RADIO ESSEX on Friday 6th June, BBC WILTSHIRE SOUND on Monday 9th June, BBC RADIO LEEDS on 5 June, BBC RADIO OXFORD on 12 June, BBC LATE SHOW in the Midlands (across 7 BBC local radio stations) on 6 June, BBC RADIO GUERNSEY on 19 June and BBC RADIO DEVEN on 26 June. The reviews we've received so far have been excellent: "A beautifully detailed picture of the dangerous but intellectually exciting times in which his subject lived"SUNDAY TELEGRAPH "Book of the Week. Nicholas Crane's new book Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet tells how Gerard Mercator, born in 1512 and son of a cobbler,became a founding father of modern geography."DAILY EXPRESS "A portrait not only of a remarkable man but also of the 16th-century world of scholarship and cartography." SUNDAY TIMES 'A colourful biography which tells the story of a cobbler's son, orphaned in his teens, who escaped the Inquisition and began

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.