Texts for Translation 2008:
  Mark Ovenden

PENGUIN BOOKS WEBSITE BLOG

MARK OVENDEN

Author of “TRANSIT MAPS OF THE WORLD”

Monday 3rd December 2007 Blog: “Why”

One question most writers get asked is; “How did you come up with the idea for your book?” Considering my offering is a collection of other people’s maps I can’t help but feel a slight tinge of embarrassment about this line of enquiry. I always want to remind people that I’m enormously grateful to the many thousands of cartographers and designers who’ve slaved away crafting and re-drawing their maps of the world’s subway systems. It was these hard-working people; and specifically a man called Paul E. Garbutt who deserve the credit and who must have had the earliest influence over my spark of interest in the subject.

For it was he who was responsible for re-drawing the classic maps of one of the worlds most celebrated designers, in the era when I would have become aware of them the first time; the mid 1960’s.

CAPTION A 1971 pocket card map of the London Underground from Marks childhood collection – this was one of the first he had and led to a lifetimes interest in the subject.

At this time I was a somewhat annoying and fidgety child being brought up by incredibly tolerant and liberal parents in West London. Most weeks, my mother would painstakingly haul my smaller sister and I on a tortuous journey across fields (yes we had real fields in the outskirts of London), to the breezy stop of the number 140 bus (which never seemed to arrive until we threatened the invisible vehicle that we’d walk off). A few miles later we’d descend the clunky escalators onto the London Undergrounds’ Central Line at fifties style Northolt station.

The journey was doubtless punctuated with tantrums, misbehavior and claims of boredom and I distinctly recall my Mum would try and distract me from annoying the other passengers by thrusting into my little four or five year old hands the nearest inoffensive thing available; the “Tube Map”.  Little was anyone to know that such early innocent gazings would turn into first a fascination, then a collection, then much research and finally a book; which most certainly has changed my life….and had an effect as well on said Mr Garbutt.

After many hours staring at the diagram the first thing that an inquisitive child might ask is “why does it seem to take longer to go what looks like the same distance”? Here was one of the great feats of a design that was first tried in the 1930’s by a certain Mr Harry Beck. I can clearly remember being gripped when my Dad tried to explain that the little diagram wasn’t entirely telling the truth about where things were!  On the London Tube map at least, geography is distorted; in order to make all the far-flung, spread-out suburban stations fit in, they are squashed closer together than they really are, while at the same time the space between stations in the central area is stretched. This makes the whole thing is easier to read.

From then on, I was hooked! I would start asking more and more questions about the diagram – answers to some of which are in the Londoners psyche (they know when it’s quicker to walk than go all the round by Underground), others would be revealed by my patient if annoying enquires. By the age of six or seven I had a fair collection of older, dog-eared London Underground maps, starting naturally with the most recent. However some of these were so different from the one I had become used to that it served only to fuel my interest further.

The version that was found in diaries and handbags from 1960 till 1964 was, it tuned out, the first major revision of the map for thirty years. It had been prepared by a Mr Harold Hutchinson. His offering first mystified me….then I appear to have been somewhat affronted by it! Station names were broken in half because they didn’t fit (Aldgate), odd kinks in the lines seemed to be there for no reason (West Brompton to Fulham Broadway), and the balance of clarity of Mr Garbutts design seemed a work of art compared to this jagged thing.  Mr Hutchinson had been handed a somewhat poisoned chalice. He was charged with “modernizing” what was both effective and cherished, putting one in mind of that oft quoted line about not fixing things that are “not broken”. Gradually after raiding old aunties’ drawers and rooting through piles of old grandparents’ papers, I found older maps. One from the 1940’s seemed light and airy compared to the modern things. Another from the mid 1950’s lacked almost any diagonals. These were from Harry Beck’s years of experimentation. Eventually my Grandad handed me a thin cloth-bound green card. Inside was the London Underground map of 1925. It had no perpendicular or horizontal lines – resembling a bag of knotted together wool or multi-colored spaghetti on a plate. This was the design that pre-dated Beck’s iconic 1930’s diagram.  Eagerly I went off to libraries while other boys were out playing aggressive street games to find out more. Even completing a “project” (a scrapbook full of bits cut out from magazines mainly) on the building of the London Underground, by the age of seven!

CAPTION Mark considered, even at an early age, that this 1961 Harold Hutchinson map of the London Underground lacked some of the expertise of its original design concepts

When a wordly uncle asked where I was on a sunny day – probably around 1972 when I was about eight or nine - Mum told him that I was up in my room “drawing underground maps”. The uncle arrived to find me happily doodling new fantasy extensions onto spare copies of London Underground diagrams from my collections. “Have you seen the New York Subway map”? he asked as he bowled into my silent scribblings.

Without the internet or even such copious saturation of American TV, I’d barely stopped to think much about the possibility of any subways outside my home city, but sure enough on his next visit he brought me a New York Subway map. Its similarity to that of London immediately struck me and it became a wall poster in my room for many years.  This was the large fold-out Massimo Vignelli map; a colorful and highly diagrammatic version of the massively complex Subway.

CAPTION The 1972 Massimo Vignelli map of the New York Subway is considered a design classic and much encouraged Marks interest in world urban rail diagrams

Not long after that I acquired a little card folder of the Paris Metro (which seemed highly un-organized to my mind) and shortly after that a map of the Merseyrail electric train services of Liverpool (another neat pocket diagram). I started experimenting with creating other complete fantasy maps – one for Milton Keynes (a British new-town which had no public transport at all) and another for the northern industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester (neither of which I’d visited, though after weeks pouring over old road maps I could name as many suburbs of Lancashire than I could of nearby towns to the more rural area I was then living in)! A childhood interest had all the hallmarks of becoming a full-on hobby.

Age 15 I attempted in art class to put back a degree of geographical accuracy to the London map while retaining those classic 45 degree angles. The resulting mess made me realize why Beck and others were forced to relinquish geographic accuracy for cartographic legibility, but with the support of far-sighted art teachers, I submitted the painting to the local Art College and it helped me get a place on their Graphic Design course.

CAPTION Marks schoolboy ‘fantasy map, of an imaginary subway system for Milton Keynes, made by him at school, age 14 or 15.

By the time I left school I had (real) urban rail maps from Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco, Moscow and several German cities. Though I put them slightly to one side and began a rather mixed career in journalism, radio production, TV and music….the little collection progressively grew as I was lucky enough to travel further afield and other people brought me back gifts from far flung cities.

Come the turn of the century after twenty years in the back seat, I noticed myself becoming more and more attracted to the now quite large and international looking collection.  Friends who knew of my odd box of maps would often ask to borrow one if they were going to Chicago or Bilbao or Montreal….and I began wondering why there was nowhere these things were all available in one place. Even the internet did not seem to offer the answers. It was one day when I was working at MTV that a colleague had heard me shout out for the umpteenth time that so-and-so’s pop video was set on this-or-that-subway that he said to me: “if you think you know so much about this stuff why don’t you write a bloody book on it!”

The idea grew. And in the next editions of these blogs I’ll explain how I went about finding the official subway maps to over 150 cities and how we managed to get clearance to reproduce them all in one book!

Tuessday 4th December 2007 Blog: “What”

In the previous Blog, details were revealed about that perennial question; ”Why did you do this book”. Today we’re looking at “What” goes into putting a book like this together. If you’re coming up with your own material, based on real-life or fiction…..you’ve got your job cut out to get those experiences over in the most entertaining way. With non-fiction you’re in a different ball park altogether.

It was 2001 and my literary space oddity was to be filled with other peoples work! I’d decided to pull together a compendium of the maps of every subway system on earth. Issue number one to tackle: how many are there?  This it turns out is less a question of counting than the more thorny issue of editorially deciding what does or what does not constitute a “subway”, “metro”, “u-bahn”, “underground” or “T”. In fact there are almost as many collective nouns for the world’s urban rail systems as there are types of system.  For instance there are “subway” systems which include sections that run on elevated track. There are “Els” that pass into tunnels for part of their route. There are also Metro’s that turn into trams and trolleybuses that pass into U-Bahn tunnels!  The choice of what to include and what to leave out became a daunting one!

By 2002 I’d got several reliable - though at times conflicting - lists of what should constitute a “proper” ‘urban rail’ system and I’d collected the required official maps of about 80% of them.  The next few tasks though would form the deal breaker of the first publication of this collection.

In no particular order were these jobs:
Find a publisher
Locate the best quality (high resolution maps) from every operator
Secure permission to reproduce the maps

You might think that tracking down a publisher for your own bizarre specialization would be the toughest prospect; oddly this turned out to be the easiest of my chores. There was a UK publishing house that were already quite well known for producing books on rather obscure aspects of public transportation – they had already produced one of the great inspirations for my book and looked like the obvious home for it. As far back as 1994 a north-west London company called ‘Capital Transport’ had printed a book all about the London Underground diagram called “Mr Becks Underground Map”. The beautiful and informative hardback by Ken Garland had been a favorite of mine since I’d first acquired it in about 1995.

Seeing my book as a natural compliment to this impressive work, I decided to approach the publishers. This turned out to be run by an affable transport fan called James Whiting. He agreed to a meeting so I hurriedly took (yet more) weeks off work to prepare my presentation to him.

By this time I was working for a fledgling UK telly channel called txt.me but much to the chagrin of the boss I spent little of my time in those last few weeks actually doing much work for them. I’d decided to propose to Jim a rough layout of how the book might look so that that he would immediately understand what I was getting at. Having nothing more at my disposal than a knackered old scanner, Microsoft Word and some low resolution versions of the maps I’d pulled off the internet, I began to assemble a rudimentary layout of the entire book that had been buzzing around in my head for over a year.

CAPTION Mark was inspired during the research by the huge diversity of diagrams produced by some cities like for example Moscow.

The result that I presented to Mr Whiting in 2002 was a really rather poor and disheveled assemblage of landscape A4 pages, cobbled together with images and text in this most basic of layouts.  When I look back at some of those sheets now I cringe because they were so far removed from the book I’m so proud to have been published!

Luckily to Jims eternal credit he saw the potential through the Scotch-taped together pages and immediately commissioned me to get on with the job.  Over the next few months I took more and more time off work to pull the first draft together, finally leaving the telly job in 2003 to finish the compilation off. The biggest task would prove to be getting the permissions to reproduce the maps – and this is the subject of the next blog: “How”.

Wednesday 5th December 2007 Blog: “How”

So the book had a subject, a publisher and a deadline….but the content – transit maps from all over the world - had yet not been approved for use: after all, they were all artworks which belonged to other people!!

With a decision taken to include the official maps of something like 150 cities, a list of the transit operators began to look like the invitations to some kind of international transportation conference! From Atlanta to Zurich, Berlin to Yokohama, letters needed to go out – preferably in the local language – to request permission to reproduce their maps.

This as you might guess turned out to be the Achilles heel of the book! Though I could get away with writing in English and my dreadfully amateurish French to over half the cities; Hindi, Korean and Russian were not in my fluencies. I managed to track down German, Spanish, Greek and even Portuguese speakers among my extended circle of friends…but some of the more exotic languages were a stumbling block. So I turned to the multi-cultural restaurants of London and began walking round with an English letter in one hand and a huge leap of faith in the other.

Thankfully a number of extremely kind restaurant workers took pity on my plight and soon I had letters translated to send to far flung cities as Kolkata, Jakarta, Taipei, Yekaterinburg, Kawasaki and Rome, to name but a few.

CAPTION: A letter asking for permission to reproduce the map of the Beijing Subway - courtesy of a London Chinese restaurant! 

At an early stage of pulling together ideas for this book I came to realize that I was less an expert than an enthusiastic amateur with the tenacity to try and pull-off the world’s first collection of transit maps. The rude awakening – as is so often the case with any over-inflated ego issues - was prompted by a good friend. I’d had the great good fortune to come across a genuine professional expert in my amateurish and frequent visits to the London Transport Museum. Mike Ashworth was an incredibly knowledgeable and affable chap who seemed to be somewhat inspired by my enthusiasm and we spent many hours pouring over old transit maps together; mainly at his home where over the years he built up a collection to rival and indeed usurp my humble array.

Mike introduced me to the right people at the Museum and I was incredibly humbled to find that they were happy to lend their support to my project. This was an enormous fillip to the book and opened many doors. From day one I had hope to be given permission to use the exquisite font that London Transport had been using, albeit in enhanced digital form, since 1917; the Edward Johnston typeface which carried his surname and has become a kind of handwriting for London itself.  After presenting my rough Microsoft Word documents to David Ellis the head of Intellectual Property Rights I was absolutely bowled over when he agreed that it would be permissible for me to use the font in the layout of the book!  This was an incredibly rare honor as LT quite rightly guards their IP very closely.

CAPTION Original 1917 sheet of the London Underground Johnston font

So armed with the Johnston Font, the support of the London Transport Museum and the intellectual brain power of Mr. Ashworth, I made the next wise move: to approach the transport industries official international organization, the UITP. They were extremely helpful and following a visit to their Brussels headquarters one chilly Spring morning in 2002, Mike and I secured an official “Introduction” to the book from the Secretary Hans Rat and brought back a plethora of new possibilities, mainly historic maps, to include in the book from the highly helpful UITP Library.

Over the next few months I continued the research and swapped emails withy many other map collectors from round the world including Robert Reed, Hans Reidel, Peter Lloyd, Max Roberts and Robert Schwandl. Finally after copious re-writes of my text and as the letters of agreement poured in from every corner of the world, the book was ready to be assembled…..and this will be covered in the next blog!

Thursday 6th December 2007 Blog: “What”

Anyone who’s ever dreamed of pulling together a book has to face the daunting subject of what to include….and more specifically; what to leave out!

As I gradually assembled the permissions to reproduce the transit maps of the world it dawned on me that there was a lot more historical material for some cities than for others. My friend Mike who had been a tower of support since the beginning of the project suddenly gained a new role: he would be my editor.

Mike helped me to focus on the subject matter; what was it about the maps that made them interesting to designers. How were they similar – and why were they different? I began several months of thorough investigation about the nature of the maps and diagrams of subways. One aspect that I began to understand a lot better was why many transit maps have adopted the schematic solution as opposed to using maps that are true to the geography of their cities above.

This has had the added benefit of not just being the most effective way of depicting the complex system of tunnels beneath our feet but also has inspired designers because when well made they are often very beautiful in their own right. The London diagram is one of the greatest examples of this as it evokes a sense of balance and clarity. This is one of the reasons why Harry Beck’s original design for the London Tube has both stood the test of time and been emulated round the world by other transit operators. It has also inspired artists to play with the design concepts and come up with pieces like "The Great Bear" -

CAPTION Sketch of Harry Becks original design for the London diagram; a crucial object to include in the book

Another aspect of the cartographer’s tool box is the symbol. An internationally recognizable graphic language has evolved on transit maps not just out of necessity but also out of the strength of the best designed maps. In addition to the similarities like color-coded lines (the single most common theme linking almost every urban rail map on the planet - which can be traced back as early as 1908 in London and New York, 1914 in Paris etc) a kind of symbolic lexicon has developed which can help any visitor comprehend any foreign system (if you cant read Russian or Japanese you should still be able to plan a journey on the Moscow or Tokyo Metro map). This is evident from the similarities in map design all over the world and has only really been collectively observed thanks to the publication of this book. For example the symbol for an interchange is very often an outline circular or spherical shape (commonly in black) with an open (often white) center. This can be seen on over half of all the worlds’ transit maps. Equally obvious is the symbol for an airport or connections to other modes of transit.

CAPTION Color-codes lines first appeared in the early 1900’s – here they can be seen on a Paris Métro map produced by the Bon Marche department store in 1914. 

In the book I tried to write not just for the transit fan but also for the casual tourist as well as for the student of graphic design. I ended up supplying many observations on the navigation of the worlds Metro systems. For instance another common graphic symbol is the end of line because the train you get on will almost always have begun its journey elsewhere and therefore it will have 'terminated' at the station you begin at just before you got there!  Having said that I bet there is a word for it in some languages - especially something like German, as they are usually so wonderfully precise in their wording.

Not having had the good fortune to visit more than half of the systems included in the book, I eventually ended up with much more text, many more images and large numbers of historical maps for the bigger, older systems.  Again it was long-suffering Mike who suggested that a good way to segregate my material would be to borrow from the iconography of transit maps, so I came up with the idea of different chapters being different “Zones” like the fare zones on many maps.

CAPTION: There’s a huge difference in sizes of subway system: here the worlds biggest, New York (from a 1948 map), alongside one of the newest and smallest: Santiago de Chile

Now at last I had a structure. I allocated more pages to the cities that had produced the most interesting and diverse range of historical maps. The newer cities or those which had not yet opened inevitably would have less space than the grand daddies like New York, Moscow or Paris. There followed a frantic re-ordering of the cities to decide which one would fit into each of initially five zones. This was a difficult task as it would inevitably imply that certain cities subways were more “important” than others, but this was definitely not the case – it was simply to do with how much space was needed to reflect the material available. 

Finally I came up with a grouping (this is the list from the American edition, though it has changed somewhat from the first UK edition)
Zone 1: 8 cities, 4 pages per city.
Zone 2: 15 cities, 2 pages per city.
Zone 3: 28 cities, 1 page per city.
Zone 4: 16 cities, 2 cities per page,
Zone 5: 18 cities, 1-3 cities per page,
Zone 6: 155 cities, about 28 cities per page,
Appendix: Fantasy maps and Index, Bibliography etc

What became apparent here are certain regional similarities. For example a number of South American subway maps have copied the Mexico City idea of displaying a unique pictogram for each individual station (alongside the full name in text) to help those who are illiterate (the story goes that London's early tube stations and those on the New York subway also featured a unique arrangement of ceramic tile decor for the same reason).  In South East Asia there's a common practice to number the stations - the standard format being line number followed by station number, hence a journey might consist of leaving from 312 changing at 319 and getting off at 502. Most German cities have a standard symbol for the U-Bahn: a giant white capital U on a blue cube: their maps are all pretty similar, save for the wonderful Stuttgart system which is depicted without a single horizontal or vertical line.

In the final blog tomorrow we’ll look at reaction the book when it was released in the UK, Autumn 2003 and how it was picked up in Holland and eventually crossed the Atlantic to be published by Penguin in 2007.

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