Woodcut map printed on paper, sixteenth century

      Redrawn from Capability Brown’s plan for Burghley House

      © The Omnipotent Magician, Jane Brown, Chatto & Windus

      ‘Maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines,’ wrote the geographer J.K. Wright in his classic essay ‘Map Makers are Human’ in 1942. Times have changed: these days, maps are turned out automatically by machines, or at least by humans using machines known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the computer hardware and software that’s used to capture, store and display geographical and topographical data and which, according to one standard introduction to GIS, ‘is changing the world and almost everything in it’. Computer mapping systems were first developed by the Canadian government and then at Harvard University during the 1960s, and by now we’re all accustomed to maps that we can simply download, pinch, zoom and click rather than scribble on, fold and leave to rot at the bottom of a rucksack: atlases at our fingertips, giant globes in our pockets. Logically, the paper map should already be consigned to the glove compartment of history. But it isn’t.

      This may be due to the fact that people simply like the look and feel of paper maps – with some people of course liking the look and feel of them much more than others. In 2006, a man called Edward Forbes Smiley III was jailed for stealing more than a hundred maps, worth $3 million, from collections at Yale, Harvard and the British Library. Smiley sliced the maps out of books using a razor blade, in much the same fashion as another famous map thief, Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer from Florida, apparently as unassuming as his name, who was in fact, according to his biographer, the ‘Al Capone of cartography’ – though without the violence, bootlegging, bribery and late-stage neurosyphilis. Bland, like Smiley, was really just a petty thief with a taste for antique paper.

      So why do people steal maps? For the same reason they steal money and books, of course: because they’re paper marked with symbols that make them valuable. But perhaps more especially, people steal maps because a map is a symbol of conquest, so the theft of a map somehow represents the ultimate conquest: the possession of the means of possession, as it were. At least, that’s my theory. No gangster mapper, I have to admit that the temptation to snaffle old paper maps has occasionally been all but overwhelming: the seventeenth-century, gold-enriched, handcoloured, multi-tinted maps issued by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and sons, for example, on display in the Dutch Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, are so extraordinary and so exquisite that only the most dimly pixel-fixated could fail to feel the stirrings of desire (Blaeu had to design and build his own printing presses in order to produce work of such quality). Or the maps produced by Christopher Saxton under the authority of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, the first ever maps of the English counties, beautiful, simple, restrained, lovingly hand-crafted by engravers and artists imported from the map-pioneering Low Countries, and popularly reproduced on playing cards. Or John Seller’s seventeenth-century sea charts: full-fathom masterpieces. Or the maps of the great Sanson family of France – no relation – whose work, in the words of one authority, was ‘always dignified and attractive, with an ornamental cartouche’. If only.

      Even my own modest collection of Half-Inch Bartholomew maps, with their tweedy Edinburgh elegance, have a kind of satisfying thickness to them, a fullness, like a wooden jigsaw puzzle, or an old Bakelite radio, a reminder that things were somehow heavier and thicker, more substantial, in the old days. The past always seems to weigh more – because often it did. My Bartholomew maps, some of them over a hundred years old and of printed paper mounted on linen, barely show their age except for a little fraying at the edges, and still sit sturdily in the hand on long hikes, like Arthur Wainwright’s ubiquitous pipe, or a greaseproof wrap of sandwiches. It just seems natural to find one’s way using a printed map – presumably because for centuries people have indeed navigated their way with paper, so we have become accustomed to them guiding us towards our destination: map-reading another of our many ingrained paper habits. In an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2008, ‘Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience’, Dr Toru Ishikawa, a cognitive-behavioural geographer at the University of Tokyo, found that pedestrians using GPS devices made more errors than those using paper maps (but that people using paper maps made more errors than those who were shown the route in person). Dr Ishikawa has also studied how people view art in museums using both audio-visual aids and traditional guidebooks and floorplans: those using the new technology tend to forget what they’ve seen quicker than those using the traditional guides. Good old paper, man’s best friend, trotting along beside us like a faithful retriever.

      It can even be relied upon in virtual realms. In the Super Mario series of video games, for example – which includes the excellent Paper Mario, Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and the spin-off Mario and Luigi series – part of the appeal and attraction is not only that Mario can fold up into a paper plane, and a paper boat, feats which are of course excellent and impressive in themselves, but also that he often navigates the bewildering virtual world with a trusty map in his white-gloved hand: an intrepid moustachioed explorer, Mario is also our guide. For home-made Mario-style mapping, an Italian self-styled ‘jedi architect and media master’ called Iacopo Boccalari has created a simple method for turning dull on-screen Google Maps into paper-looking on-screen Google maps (see www.iacopoboccalari.com), while MapsOnPaper.com, run by a Swedish design agency, will transform a screen-friendly map into a printer-friendly format. Paper remains the ghost in the machine. Metaphorically.

      Literally. Recently, the increased availability of open-source data and mapping tools has allowed people to make their own maps: in the now customary Web 2.0 fashion, map consumers have become map producers. This new kind of map-making is sometimes called neo-cartography, and in 2004 a man called Steve Coast became one of the first digital neo-cartographers when he created something called OpenStreetMap (OSM), the Wikipedia of maps. Using a cheap hand-held GPS device, Coast set out to create a map that could be made freely available, without copyright restrictions, and that could be added to and edited by others. In the words of its mission statement, OpenStreetMap is ‘dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share’. What’s amazing is that the using and sharing of geospatial data via OSM still requires paper in order to work effectively. Not everyone has the cutting-edge digital tools or cartographic instincts or training to be able to add meaningful details to digital maps, so various methods of contributing to OSM maps have quickly evolved, including the so-called Walking Papers method, which allows people to print OSM maps on paper, add details to them with a pen, and then scan them back onto the map using the OSM web-based software. It’s easy: we’re all neo-cartographers now. And, crucially, it isn’t just a hobby for wannabe geographers.