Map of the Month: Nov 08 - A Map in Marquetry

Most maps are paper, unless they’re digital. This one, however, is made of wood. It’s ten inches by twelve - even with its frame - and it’s a nice example of the marquetarian’s art. (I had to look that term up). It is one of several maps which look over me as I work on the computer at home, and by far the smallest of them - the size is not surprising when you consider how much work must have gone into it, and what a refined level of detail the outlines show. Generalised as a compromise to suit the technology, it’s not.

There are lots of things I don’t know about this work of art. For instance, I don’t know what projection it’s on, or how dimensionally accurate it is, and I’ve got no intention of working out the scale, and I can’t tell you what types of wood it was made from. I also have no idea who made it - other than that it was a local man who was prepared to do this sort of thing for peanuts. He didn’t engrave his name on the back, and there isn’t even a sticker. We bought this item, new, for twelve quid at a craft fair that my wife insisted on happening to pop into.

I’ve been looking at it again recently as a result of deciding to write about it here. On the closest inspection it has ever had, the sad thought suddenly occurred to me that it was not in fact marquetry at all, but merely produced using an outline marked with a stylus and somehow stained cunningly to suggest that it was made from different pieces of wood artfully wrought. But it soon becomes clear that it cannot be a fraud: the two woods have slightly different grains, so they don’t match precisely (though they have been aligned to give a good impression of it), and in certain lights you can detect a few microscopic pinholes where a tool must have been inserted, or turned.

Maybe cartographers and cartophiles out there would like to tell me what it is a map of. Well, I do already know that much - and anyway I did get a major clue even if I hadn’t recognised it, because I bought it in the place it portrays, during a summer holiday of uncharacteristic Mediterranean sun. [So, it’s nowhere near the Med, then - Ed.]. The location will either spring out at you, or else cause wrinkled brows. If it helps, I can confirm that it is the ‘right way up’, in conventional mapping terms.

It isn’t too tough to work out, at least, that it is an archipelago of some sort. There are of course no place names to help you - that would have been asking a bit much of the marquetarian’s skill. And anyway I think names would spoil the aesthetic of this simple [in one way] and rather satisfying graphic.

So where in the world is it? Send your suggestions, using the comment function near the bottom of this post, by the 19th of December, and I’ll reveal the answer then.

There will be no actual prizes, though, unless Dave Mumford has developed some way of emailing those chocolate bars that he generally hands out as quiz prizes, here in the offices of Collins Geo on the sometimes sunny northern outskirts of Glasgow.

Roger Pountain, Senior Information Analyst, Collins Geo