Examines the pivotal relationship between mapping and civilization, demonstrating the unique ways that maps relate and realign history, and shares engaging cartography stories and map lore.

Not so long ago we timed our lives by the movement of the sun. These days our time arrives atomically and insistently, and our lives are propelled by the notion that we will never have enough of the one thing we crave the most. How have we come to be dominated by something so arbitrary? The compelling stories in this book explore our obsessions with time. Timekeepers is a vivid exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained and saved time over...

An ode to the dwindling art of letter writing explores its potential salvation in the digital age, chronicling the history of letter writing as reflected by love letters, chain mail, and business correspondence, while surveying the role that letters have played as literary devices.

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive, and it soon became clear that this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex,...