Up, up and away

A fascinating book for the armchair traveller with several hundred maps created by airline marketing folk. Perhaps not too relevant for fans of real maps because those in the book are basically for sales rather than a realistic view of the world. The seven chapters, or as the book calls them terminals, look historically at airlines from the 1920s onward. I thought some of the early maps, especially in Africa, interesting because there are airports (or perhaps grass strips is more appropriate) in places that fell into obscurity.

There are some wonderful examples of maps that get the full artistic treatment. Page thirty-nine has a superb Pan Am painting of the world by Helguera with the sea, sailing ships, planes and continents painted with the usual symbols for various countries: pyramids for Egypt; Eiffel Tower for France; kangaroos for Australia. These very decorative maps throw up one of the faults of the book, it isn't big enough to reveal the beauty of the many artistic maps.

There are maps or diagrams is a better description where geography is completely absent, pages forty-five (Czech Airlines) and seventy-nine (China Civil Aviation) have graphics of routes and times so complex as to make the information worthless. The Spanish airline Spanair uses a graphic on page 140 that is just pretty decoration placing, for example, New York next to Istanbul and Alicante next to Toronto.

Delightful though the book is it has some editorial flaws so I've given it four stars. As I've mentioned above it should have been bigger but even at the existing size all the maps could have been much larger if the generous page margins were reduced and the text which runs on various pages was all placed on the first few pages.