The Phantom Atlas

The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps!

This richly illustrated book collects and explores the colorful histories behind a striking range of real antique maps that are all in some way a little too good to be true.

The Phantom Atlas is a guide to the world not as it is, but as it was imagined to be. It's a world of ghost islands, invisible mountain ranges, mythical civilizations, ship-wrecking beasts, and other fictitious features introduced on maps and atlases through mistakes, misunderstanding, fantasies, and outright lies.

Author Edward Brooke-Hitching is a map collector, author, writer for the popular BBC Television program QI and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He lives in a dusty heap of old maps and books in London investigating the places where exploration and mythology meet.

The Phantom Atlas uses gorgeous atlas images as springboards for tales of deranged buccaneers, seafaring monks, heroes, swindlers, and other amazing stories behind cartography's greatest phantoms.