A model globe for his mother's seventy-fifth birthday: that was all Casimir Brandt, then living in Edinburgh, set out to buy in 2010. Yet this modest idea, straightforward as it first appeared, grew into a near-obsession that consumed the best part of ten years and threw up enough setbacks to have discouraged a less stubborn person. By the time it was over, Brandt had founded what remains the only made-to-order globemaking firm in the world.
What The Globemakers, Brandt's record of this on-a-whim project, reveals first is that picking up such an object involved far more than clicking 'buy' online and wincing at the delivery charge. The notion that our forebears were hopelessly ignorant about geography is remarkably persistent, yet in truth the spherical shape of the Earth has been understood for more than two and a half thousand years. A stitched leather ball was the comparison drawn by the philosopher Demarchos in one of his surviving dialogues, and the earliest globe on record is generally credited to Straton of Assos, thought to have fashioned one somewhere around 160 BCE. A well-made globe, Brandt assumed, could hardly be hard to come by.
Roughly two thousand years on, though, the craft of making globes appeared to have slipped almost entirely out of memory. In the auction rooms Brandt found true antiques priced well beyond what he could afford, and elsewhere only crude mass-produced models meant for the schoolroom. Journeys as far afield as Turkey and Japan, where he had hoped the expertise of traditional cartographers* might have survived, led nowhere.
Undaunted, Brandt resolved to build a quality globe himself, whereupon virtually every step that could go wrong duly did. The Earth's form was a difficulty in itself: rather than a true sphere it is oblate, flattened a little at each pole. He settled on a compromise, two half-spheres joined together, but then could find nobody able to cast the moulds precisely enough to guarantee that the two halves would end up with matching circumferences. And once that had finally been sorted out, prising the pieces free of the moulds left the workshop behind his house strewn with broken plaster of Paris* and thick with a dust that caught in the throat.
* cartographer: someone involved in the science or practice of drawing maps * plaster of Paris: a quick-setting plaster consisting of a fine white powder that hardens when moistened and allowed to dry
What all these failed trials taught him about the difficulties of the craft, Brandt passes on to his readers. Working out how to ease the globes cleanly from their moulds — the answer, in the end, was a top-of-the-range air compressor — and tracking down paper and inks that would form the gores (the flat map segments glued onto the sphere) without the colour bleeding into an illegible smear, cost him many months and a startling sum of money. You can feel his exasperation as he describes the delicate business of fixing the gores in place, a stage reached only after he had hunted down a glue with exactly the right stickiness. And then, almost at the finish, came the discovery that the paper had stretched a fraction, leaving the last segment lapping over the first by a single centimetre — trivial-sounding, perhaps, until you realise that one centimetre stands for two per cent of the planet's diameter, enough to erase the Himalayas or rub out Chile.
Running alongside Brandt's account of these technical trials is a set of digressions on the master globemakers of earlier centuries and on the history of cartography more broadly. Those after fuller cartographic detail may feel a little short-changed, and yet in Joos van Dael the author plainly recognised a kindred spirit. It was van Dael, a craftsman of Bruges, who in 1489 produced the Wereldbol — the oldest globe still in existence — its surface exquisitely finished by a team of painters and other artisans, only for news to arrive that a westbound expedition had blundered upon unknown lands that very year, leaving his creation obsolete on the day it was done. A comparable, if still grander, single-mindedness marks the labours of the Venetian mapmaker Ludovico Farsetti, who in the eighteenth century built a pair of globes for an Austrian archduke. The colossal twins, each close to three and a half metres across, took him twenty-five years and survive today in the Imperial Library in Vienna.
For all that it celebrates the rebirth of an old craft, Brandt's book is at the same time an elegy for skills that are quietly disappearing. Setting out on his globemaking adventure, he found it hard to track down either artisans able to make the moulds correctly or foundries that could form the meridians — the metal hoops that encircle a globe — to the necessary standard. The right craftsmen did turn up in the end, a few of them simply wandering by chance into his workshop, which by then occupied rather better premises than his old back room, but a good number have since retired or died.
Brandt's mother did get her seventy-fifth birthday globe in the end, though a full two years behind schedule. Her son went on to establish a firm that today produces more than five hundred globes annually, making them for clients who might ask for their own small village to be marked or for stranger requests besides. Richly illustrated with photographs charting each phase of his undertaking, together with a handful of pictures of old globes and maps, the book is anything but a manual for turning a profit. What it does do, and amply, is kindle admiration — for the artistry of the great mapmakers of former times, and for the dogged obstinacy of the modern-day heir who brought their all-but-dead craft back to life.
