*Top,* a British card deck from the mid–19th century that could be used either as normal playing cards or in the Court Game of Geography, where each suit represented a continent. *Above,* a late-17th-century world map by Dutch cartographer Gerard van Schagen reflects the Netherlands’s time as the first global maritime power.

A mid-19th-century British game in the vein of Snakes and Ladders, Wallis’s New Game of Wanderers in the Wilderness was one in a series dedicated to different continents.

*Top,* an early example of an isothermal map, used to link places with similar climates, from 1823. *Above,* a mid-19th-century map of Paris comprises 20 arrondissements in the city’s now iconic spiral design.

The artwork for Saul Steinberg’s March 1976 *New Yorker* cover, *View of the World from 9th Avenue,* reveals as much by what it leaves out as by what it includes.

A 16th-century map of the Nile is oriented with South at the top and the Mediterranean at the bottom. The ancient Egyptians used cartography to plot landownership and field boundaries after the annual flooding of the river.

*Top,* a 16th-century map by Heinrich Bünting made during the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism. Jerusalem is at the center of this cloverleaf model, while England, Scandinavia, and America don’t make the cut. *Above,* Daniel K. Wallingford exaggerates the legendary provincialism of 1930s Americans in the urban Northeast to comic effect. This map is often believed to have inspired Steinberg’s *View of the World from 9th Avenue.*

Oronce Finé’s 1536 cordiform projection—from the Latin for heart, *cor,* and deriving from the work of Ptolemy—is an equal-area map, showing each landform in correct proportion to the others. The map projects a *concordia mundi—*a world in harmony.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth

A book showcasing exquisite drawings both ancient and modern captures our evergreen relationship with mapping the world

Saint Augustine once asked, “Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul?” The act of taking a three-dimensional surface and projecting it onto a plane is similarly laden and, as a book collecting more than 250 maps shows, spans millennia and approaches. Modern cartography, according to most historians, can be traced to the ancient Greeks—the second-century Greek-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy is believed to have been the first to classify the concepts of latitude and longitude—and the scroll maps of East Asia, and has since transcended the informational to inhabit a hybrid sphere of science and artistic design. Here, images from ancient Egypt to New York City explore the ways in which we have mapped the world throughout history. —Julia Vitale

Royal Geographical Society, London (card deck); Amsterdam University Library, Amsterdam (Netherlands); Daniel Crouch Rare Books (game); SPL (isothermal); David Rumsey Map Collection (Paris); © the Saul Steinberg Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/DACS, London 2014 (Steinberg); the Walters Art Museum (Nile); Norman B. Leventhal Map Center/Boston Public Library (Bünting); David Rumsey Map Collection (Wallingford); Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Fine)