How one author added value to his

      book: a case history

One rule I always follow: the author (or editor) is king of the jungle. It’s his book. He should make the important decisions. The mapmaker can make suggestions, but the author is the final judge. Once the important decisions are made, it’s up to the mapmaker to follow the “rules” decided on.

Such was the case in the examples that follow – all from one author’s book about the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. This book described in minute detail many military maneuvers in the Ardennes Forest.

Without the maps, the reader would have been totally lost, unless he taught geography at Bastogne. Too many cities. Four countries involved (Belgium, Luxembourg. The Netherlands, and Germany). Troop movements going every which way. Sixty years later, it was impossible to think about trying to show conventional war maps with arrows, symbols, etc.

So the author (a participant in the Battle of the Bulge) chose to have me, the mapmaker, follow these “rules” for each map:

• Select the part of the territory covered by the text.
• Show all the cities and roads inside that territory.
• Show rivers and streams that complemented the text.
• Highlight cities important to the specific text by making them larger and underlining them.

No arrows. No symbols. No “front” lines. No shading. No delineating which side controlled what land.

The author made most of these decisions, in consultation with me, the mapmaker.

The maps appeared in numerical order in the book, which explains why the best overall view of the territory is Map 2 – Map 1 shows the area for a battle that the author writes about first.

It’s not difficult to see how valuable the maps were to the book.